By Heinz Richter
During the 13 years I
taught photography, one important aspect was composition. This was often an enigma to many of my
students. But it served to improve their
photography to quite an extend.
However, it also created
another, new problem. People began to
concentrate so much on the subject matter, to present it as good as possible,
that they began to ignore the background.
The result were often good photographs that, however, were useless
because of a very bad background.
A similar problem often occurs
by choosing the wrong place to shoot at in the first place although this cannot
be helped at times.
One type of photography
that is easily riddled with mistakes like this is wedding photography. Modern cameras with automatic everything have
created a venue of wedding photography that is done by ultimately totally unqualified
individuals. Mistakes abound.
Most people are familiar
or at least are aware of Photoshop. In
the past I have written about the advantages of Photoshop as a tool to improve
our photographs. But it has also created
a certain carelessness during actual shooting because ‘Photoshop will take care
of that’.
Yes, it can, but that
often is not easy. Here are some examples:
The first was a situation
where the photographer concentrated on the wedding party and totally
ignored the background. Then, when it
was pointed out that a cemetery as a background for a wedding party was less
than ideal, his answer was that Photoshop would take care of that.
Well, Photoshop did indeed
take care of it, but the photographer did not have anywhere near the necessary
skills to do so with the result that I was asked to take care of the problem.
After finding a photograph
with a suitable background and very similar lighting, I carefully separated all
the individuals in the wedding party, including some of the shadows and
transferred them onto the photograph with the much better background.
Photoshop saved the day,
but not with considerable time and effort, something that easily could have
been avoided by using an appropriate background in the first place.
The next photograph is a very good example where the photographer forgot to take an important photograph under pressure from the time restraints of the moment. He forgot to take a photograph of the bride with her mom. Not a good thing to do. Photoshop allowed to put the bride into another photograph with the mother. Mom was happy.
This is a montage of two separate photographs to put the bride into one photograph with her mother.
The next photograph is
not so much a mistake by the photographer, rather a situation where time
constraints demanded that the photograph was taken then and there.
The result is a lot of
clutter and distracting detail which ultimately hurts the photograph as a
whole. In addition, the photograph is slightly blurred. Again, Photoshop allowed changing
an almost useless picture to a worthwhile memory of the important day by removing some of the clutter, and using the artistic filter gallery to give the photograph a painting like appearance.
The final example is
another photograph which had to be taken right then with little possibility
to change the background reflected in the mirror. Simply removing the distracting pipes in
Photoshop resulted in a much better photograph.
Many photographers feel
that Photoshop is used much too often to cover mistakes that should have been
avoided in the first place, and rightfully so.
But Photoshop should also be recognized as a very good tool to improve
photographs that suffer from having been taken under less than ideal
conditions.
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For other articles on this blog please click on Blog Archive in the column to the right
To comment or to read comments please scroll past the ads below.
All ads present items of interest to Leica owners.
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