Messing Around With Lightroom

For the longest time I've been of the you should use whatever you get out of your camera school of photography.  Probably for 80 to 90% of my pictures that works pretty well.  I mean, I've done a few croppings every now and then, but for the most part, I haven't messed around with exposure setting or things like that.  Now that I've picked up Lightroom, I think that is going to change a bit.

Ansel Adams wrote a series of three books about photography.  They were entitled "The Camera", "The Negative" and "The Print".  Basically the philosophy is that photography is more than just shooting the picture.  There is a little bit of art and I think the art comes into play when you start messing around in the darkroom.  Well there isn't a darkroom in digital photography, but there is software that simulates what you can do in the darkroom.

Does that mean I can take crappy pictures in the camera and if I mess around with them enough in Lightroom or Photoshop and they will turn into great pictures?  No.  You still have to be careful with what you take with the camera.  A blurry picture in the camera will still be a blurry picture after messing around with it in whatever program you mess around with it in.  A way underexposed photograph will not have enough details to flesh out in the program.  Same goes for a way overexposed picture.

Since we don't have those three elements in digital, if Ansel Adams were around today, what books would he write?  Well, he would probably still write "The Camera" because when you strip out all the bells and whistles, a digital camera is still pretty much the same as the camera in Ansel Adams' day.  There is still a lens and medium that reacts to light.  But instead of a chemical reaction, you have an electronic reaction.  The parts of the sensor react to light in much the same way that film did.

"The Negative" would probably become "The File" or something to that effect.  One of these days, I should try shooting in RAW mode.  Apparently that is as close to a negative that you can get.  When you shoot in "JPG" mode, the camera is doing some of the compression.  "RAW" is a straight dump from the camera's sensor, so basically what the camera saw at the time is what gets translated to the memory card.

"The Print" would probably still stay the same although the focus might be a little different.  In Ansel Adams case, "The Print" would refer to the work he did in the darkroom.  Surprisingly, there are many things that you could do in the darkroom to modify a picture.  One of the things that he would do was "dodging" and "burning".  "Dodging" is where you would cover the area you did not want more exposure to and expose the rest of the print.  "Burning" is the opposite.  You cover the rest of the print and then expose an area more.  Much of the stark contrast on his print is because of that.  In the digital world, you can do that with software.

So what does all of this mean?  I think that if I want to take the next step with my photography, I will have to do more work with some of the software.  I don't want to go too crazy with it though because I'm not a fan of the overprocessed pictures that often go around.

 How does all of this translate to something?  Well, let's take the above picture.  For the most part, I enjoy the picture but I took it under some pretty trying circumstances.  The sun was going down and it was already overcast.  The sky looks a little washed out.  This was a perfect opportunity to mess around with some of the masking in Lightroom.

Which I did.  I also did a little cropping.  Sadly this is also an example of there is only so much you can do in the software.  I would have preferred a little more room at either end of the ship but oh well.

So what do you think?  I like the second picture a little more, but I think I need a little more learning.