Do you use effects on your photography?
Somebody asked me during a recent exhibition if I use any effects on my photos. The answer to this is not really.
I started taking photos with a free 110 camera given away by KitKat in the 1980s and gradually worked my way up to SLR film cameras. A roll of film could limit you to 24 or 32 photos or thereabouts (if you were lucky, you might get an extra photo!). When you had these limitations, you made sure you took the best photos you could take as films and processing came at a cost.
When DSLRs came along, you no longer had these restrictions and could quite happily take as many photos as your memory card allowed (which was/is more than 24/32). But as digital photography arrived so did complacency, and therefore a bad picture could be corrected to some extent through software, and led some bad habits when taking photos. I have to admit, I sometimes forget that my camera is set up for a completely different situation and I curse myself sometimes when I think I have got a good shot, only to discover that my shutter speed was too low or too high.
As I come from the photographic age before digital, and spent many hours in darkrooms and all the rest, I still have the mentality that the camera should do most of the work. Take a good photo and there shouldn't be much need for software to get involved. However, .... this is not the age we live in, and now software is seen as an integral part of photography. I know some photographers that gave up the hobby because they felt that most of their time was going to be spent editing photos with software instead of taking and printing actual photos. I think this is a shame.
I tend to set up my camera to take the best possible photo dependent on conditions to cut down anything I have to do with software. What I tend to do is correct the exposure, brightness & contrast, highlights, de-noise and sharpen. I sometimes play around with colours if I feel something needs a little extra pop. Another thing I let software do is HDR where I might take 5 photos with different apertures and merge them together to solve the problem of too much contrast that the camera can't handle if I take a single image. This can lead to an image looking as if it has had a filter applied to it, and to be honest, I quite like the way an image looks when I do this, but I only use it in certain situations. The other technique I use is focus stacking where the camera takes a batch of images each with a different point of focus. I then combine these photographs to create one ultra-sharp image. The problem with macro photography, especially if you are really close to the subject, is that the lens will focus on the centre point and the rest of the image will be out of focus. If you want to create a close-up image that is sharp, then focus stacking is the way to go. However, with insect photography, this doesn't always work as the subject will move and blow your chance of any decent focus stacked image. I've pulled it off once or twice, but it usually doesn't work that well.
There's not getting away from it. Software is useful and I think as a photographer you do have to use it just to enhance photos a little bit more than what the camera can give you as a RAW image. My tip will always be: let the camera do the work so that you're not stuck behind a desk using countless hours using software.
