Kirkville:
It’s not that hard to learn how to do simple editing, even in an app like Apple’s Photos. You don’t need Lightroom and Photoshop, like all the “serious” photographers; simple apps, even on a smartphone, can make changes to photos.
I tell my photography students this all the time. Half of the work of a good photo is in the edit. Learn how to edit (even simple edits in the iPhone) and your photos will get better. Thanks to Dave Mark for the link.
Also, learn how to throw out junk photos instead of attempting to use digital tools to resurrect photos that are just plain bad. Not saying it has to be perfect in camera but a well-exposed, in-focus image is a better starting point for most final images.
There’s a reason only a third of Ansel Adam’s epic trilogy is devoted to the Camera, and the other two books are all about the darkroom, aka, ‘editing’.
True, but you should also only throw out a photo after looking at it on a big screen. One of my favorite shots I’ve taken was shot from the hip (literally) with the improper settings (I’d been outside and was inside for a bit) of a guy walking out the doors of the graduate school I was in. Looking at it on the tiny screen on my camera, it looked like shit, but I was able to recover it and get a good picture out of it… to the point that it was used in that school’s Career Services brochure (across from the “where will you go from here?” page).
I still have the press sheet from that, since it was the first photo I ever took that got published. 🙂
Absolutely. I never toss stuff in camera and don’t chimp at all as a rule.