This week at Irvine Camera Club was a lot of fun. Over the last couple of weeks our members had been paired up with each other and asked to swap photographs. The intention was for everyone to get someone else’s photograph and to add their own interpretation in post-processing.
There is still a school of thought that says a photo should be presented as it was taken, without any processing in software like Photoshop. The truth is that these days phones and cameras can do an amazing about of adjustment to your images before you see them. So, the idea of straight out of camera is really no longer relevant, if indeed it ever was.
When you get seriously into photography you begin to realise that taking the photograph is only the beginning of the process. The adjustments you can make to the crop, colour balance, exposure and contrast are all vital to how your vision is portrayed to the viewer. More controversially perhaps, we now have an amazing array of tools that allow the photographer to remove unwanted elements in an image, to blend more than one photo or to create whole new realities.
The images I am showing you this week therefore have two names listed against them. The person who edited the photo and the person who took it. On the night we looked at the original image, the partner’s and the photographer’s edit. Sometimes the results were spectacularly different from each other and other times, very similar. Either way, there was lots of really interesting conversation about what had been done and perhaps more importantly, why the edits had been made.
It was great to see such a large turnout and a lively and encouraging conversation with everyone really getting into the swing of things. Lots of the techniques being discussed were new to some of our members and I’m hoping that they will be inspired to practice what they had seen their partners demonstrate.
The club is running bi-weekly studio nights and processing workshops on Monday evenings at Townend Community Centre where everyone is welcome to come along to learn from more experienced members.
I hope you enjoy this rather different collaborative collection of photographs and that perhaps you might feel inspired to try some creative processing on your own photos.
Until next week, stay safe and enjoy the light!
