~bartona

...after reading a journal entry by Chris Weeks, one of the best photographers I've ever seen and someone I look up to as a photographer, it occurred to me that I do TONS of post editing to make up for lack of experience and skill with my camera.

Let me explain in this brief photo journal of an event I did a couple weekends ago and a bridal portrait I did. First off, I bought an SB-800 speedlight for my d70 and just started using it when I went to this event, so my experience with on-camera flash was minimal.

Ran into a couple problems I haven't had to deal with before...like lighting up the background or having too much dof in my shots. It wasn't all my fault though, because I let a friend pop off a ton of shots of people and he kept changing the settings and putting it on auto and stuff.

Oh and I have a couple spots on my lens, that a professor just helped me clean the correct way, and even though they were small it wasn't fun cloning each one out(I used the patch tool because it was quick and easy).

With all that said, the post editing I do is mostly restricted to the levels, blurring, cropping, patching/cloning spots, converting to black&white or multi-tone, adding contrast or saturation, and a couple other sharpening and softening techniques I've learned---WAIT I DON'T actually have any restrictions with what I would manipulate, I just want the image to look like I want. Having grown up in the digital age I sometimes shoot underexposed knowing how many stops I can bring back in camera raw as another method of bracketting (I bet that makes most photographers sick to hear). It makes sense if I want the veil of a bride to be different from the background and can't do it yet with good lighting to do it as a manipulation.

I guess that makes me a photographer/retoucher/manipulator...



What the crap was I focusing on...I thought I moved the ring to, OH! Dustin changed the focus ring to auto...what field was the focus in though...top right?



Yes, this is the ground with TTL [BL] flash shot straight down. Thank you again to Dustin.



Fixed the focus problem, but I didn't expect the horse to be lit up so much, I wanted to stop a little action but keep it out of the f/stop range...not exactly what I had in mind.



Nice shadow on his chest...Never seen anyone block having a picture taken this way before. Where is that blue cast coming from on his chest shadow...the sky?



Thats me on the left with Dustin's prescription shades on, he's taking the picture too.



I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, nobody told me this was a high class affair. All these girls I went with are all dressed up in their sundresses...and then me.



It was my flash originally in her glasses, but I took the reflection out and put some of the skyline in their instead. Problem from shooting a flash at 90 degrees turned into a cool reflection that couldn't be possible.



Looks like wind, but they were just walking fast. Shot off the hip if you can't tell.



I wonder if I could crop that trash can out...or if I should. But either way I don't have the time now.



After the post editting.



This is as shot. This one needed an exposure boost because I zoomed in to 70mm and didn't change my settings or flash location. Camera said like less than 4300 but I put this around 5120 in Raw. +6 tint.



This is the result of post editing.



The things I changed in Raw included the tempertature and a +6 add in tint, my camera read the lighting at about 4600 but it was actually closer to 5050 because of the flash I was using and I should have known that and done it in camera. I cropped it later and removed spots with cloning and patching.


CAN'T WAIT FOR THE 28-105MM NIKON LENS I ORDERED...IT PROBABLY WONT EVER LEAVE MY CAMERA.