First day back at MCDS

Ready for impact – pre-game warm up

sending it over the net..

Yesterday was our first day back to Miami Country Day School for the new school year and we started out by doing individual and game photos of the Middle School Varsity and Jr Varsity Volleyball teams.

One of the critical responsibilities of a photographer whom is shooting for a client is to solve their visual problems. Sometimes, to create interesting images you need to create your own visual problems and then find solutions for them. Many times this is accomplished by changes in angle, height, lens, depth of field, etc. In other words, getting out of the safety zone and taking some risks. Other times, it means trying to find the solution through editing.

Editing can have a strong effect on both the visual and emotional responses to an image. Converting an image to black and white or over saturating the colors can emphasis different parts of the image almost as much as lighting can.  One of the problems with editing for response is that its very easy to go too far. For these edits I used OnOne Software‘s Perfect Image for texturing, skin enhancements, and the borders. The rest of the edits were done in Adobe Lightroom.

Perfect Image and Lightroom are just two of the many many different software packages and  presets to download and/or  buy. There is more software available for this type of editing then there are grains of sand in a 2-yr old’s diaper after a day at the beach. As such, it can be very easy to stare at the screen for days on end trying preset after preset until something comes along that is vaguely interesting. As with any editing session to help prevent overload and going overboard, its important to have pre-visualized a starting point and an ending point. This is not intended to discount the experience of experimenting with the presets, but to prevent unproductive clicking.  And remember, presets are a starting point, not an ending point!

While I do add film borders to many of my images, I do not tend to favor texturing the surface of an image. This type of editing is outside my safety zone and is a visual problem I will continue to explore.

More to come…