digital

photography

Here’s the wrap up May Festival (La Féria de Barillas) pictures. So many great photo opportunities, and way more importantly I’m starting to learn how to not bring along my camera sometimes. In the Féria the town showed all it’s colors, the ones I like and the ones I don’t like. So many parts of Mayan heritage and equally so much trying-to-be-western, so many fat men who’ve never ridden a horse wearing cowboy clothes and so many malnourished children in expensive parades. So many smiles, too.

I’m somewhere between right and judgmental gringo and wrong.

 

other, photography

Well..I’ve done it. I bought LR3; the install just finished, and I’m poking around for a few minutes before hitting the sack. I took my first step onto the slippery slope of digital world a few weeks ago, D200 in hand, and now I step again. I will still resolutely dislike digital photo editing, with the following (maybe sorta possible) exceptions:

1. mellow HDR
The mind essentially does this when you look at a sunrise, it balances color/light so that you can see full detail in the ground (dark) and full color in the sky (bright). Well..actually I think what happens is that you see full detail in your field of view (the breadth/width human eyes can focus clearly on at one time), while the mind corrects the colors outside of that. I think I’m right, but may be far from fallacy-free. From the little browsing of HDR’d images I’ve done, what you “see” lands somewhere between a typical single exposure and a typical HDR job. I’m going to play around with very mellow HDR processing and some low light exposures. All that said, I’m super skeptical of it. I like natural light shots. I like them a lot. Yes details are lost and/or colors get washed out..but that’s part of what makes a perfectly taken photo so crazy beautiful, isn’t it? So yeah, HDR..we’ll see.

2. White balance
Film is awesome. It does white balance all on it’s own..oh wait, no, it’s SO awesome it doesn’t even need to do white balance! As a matter of fact, most film simply captures colors as most folks see them, straight up yo. Digital sensors aren’t that technologically advanced yet (oohhhhHHH SNAP, kid. Yeah huh). So when I have a digital shot with off-key white balance, I’ll fix it.

3. Straightening
Yup.

4. Exposure Value
Ummm..I’m on the fence about this one. I take a fair number of pictures, not knowing how my camera’s light metering functions would be pathetic, so I shouldn’t be flubbing up the exposure value to need to correct it. That said, I will likely use it to “push” exposures when need be (i.e., when cranking up the ISO and opening the aperture doesn’t cut it).

I can’t think of anything else at the moment. Tons of thoughts and ideas go through my head when I think about digital photo editing and before long I start thinking about what photography actually is. Someday I hope I’ll have good clear thoughts on all that riff raff and I’ll write it all up real nice and simple.