Springtime. Er, summer down here in the swamp. Hot and humid. Wet and drippy. And, some of the trees look like they were photographed during the fall.
Trust me.
They were photographed in the last two days. On dog walks. Morning dog walks. She isn’t stupid. She likes going out early or late in the day, when things aren’t so hot.
Funny thing about living in the swamp. Different plants and trees shed their leaves at different times of year. The most colorful leaves in both pictures are those of Texas Live Oaks. They lose their leaves in late spring and early summer.
Making the pictures was the easy part. See them, photograph them, process them. Done. Before you say that you think pictures should come straight from the camera untouched, don’t. Don’t tell me that you work in .jpeg so pictures the come right out of the camera aren’t processed, they are. That’s what a camera does when you work in ,jpeg. It’s a little computer. It processes the latent image. It also drops out certain pixels of the image that the software deems as being unnecessary. It sort of “thins” out the image.
Think about this. Most of you will post your new picture on some kind of social media. You upload your newly created picture and guess what? Your platform of choice reprocesses the image so that it fits within their parameters. It further “thins” out the image. To you it probably looks really flat — lacking in contrast and blacks. To your viewer the picture just doesn’t look so good.
Better to work in RAW. Better to have the entire file. Better to make processing choices yourself. Better to make your picture, rather than some robo-picture. You can control the contrast. The size. The overall detail. At the very least, your work stands on its own merit. The praise is yours. the criticism is also yours. Alone.
That’s why nothing I post on — for example, Facebook — is actually posted on Facebook. When you see a picture that you like and open it up, you are taken right back here. I am basically protecting my work from a legal and an artistic standpoint. And, even though Instagram is owned by Facebook, the same thing happens when you open an Instagram picture.
None of this is perfect. But, it’s better.
For now, that’s the best we can do. Besides. Perfection is for angels.
