Taking photos/Random Thoughts

Of course there will always be the debate about how much editing is acceptable.
There will always be a huge debate.
To Edit or To Not Edit.

I am somewhat in the middle. A little editing can go a very long way. 

I like to take .RAW files now. I can breeze through them in CorelAfterShotPro 3 and get a good job done quickly. I guess I am plugging Corel because they haven't gone the way of Adobe where you have to pay monthly to use Lightroom and CC.

I've also found ON1 to be extremely easy and fun to use.
It has the ability of taking my .ORF and my .NEF files and working with them and I can save them in a variety of file types.

However, I am always interested in improving what I do. I read up on tutorials and watch the occasional video. 

One of the items I see floating around the internet is videos that teach you in certain programs of how to change the sky in your photo that you've taken.
Yikes! Okay, that is fun and it can add a lot of drama to a photo.

But when did we stop taking real photos? Or better yet, why do some folks post edit photos and spend more time on them in the digital dark room than they did thinking about taking the shot.

I've harped on this before. And I am as guilty as the next person for post editing shots. And perhaps I am all wrong too...

I have learned a few tricks that could help me get a more interesting shot than the conventional way. But swapping out skies seems a bit extreme for me.

I don't mind cloning out a small distraction, but going to the far end of the spectrum is a bit unrealistic.
So I don't know if I'd qualify as a purest ~ no, I am not. But I won't spend hours swapping skies, cloning in or out rocks, and other items on a photo.

I think about what I want to do, watch the weather for a perfect sky and then try to compose something that will work.

Here is an edit that is very obvious.

Here is another. Replaced sky added a moon, but it is all quite obvious.

Here is a shot I took a long time to think out and do. I took many shots on a beautiful morning. I used an Infrared filter and also did some shots with a ND filter.

I came up with this, edited to black and white.

[This shot was taken obviously before our house remodel.]

I like to do less as more.

I studied the lighting in this shot and went with what filtered through the window in the late evening out onto the porch.

I've done some pretty wild stuff, but always seem to come back to the basics.
I even once in a while go a bit overboard in exploring things like HDR.

Recently I've gotten an interest in bugs. I've read up on how some of the professionals get great 'insect' shots and learned about something called Image Stacking. Image stacking led me to Focus Peaking and searching out how to manual focus properly in an Automatic Focus world.

I'm making the circles. Landscapes, Macro, Panoramic, High Dynamic Range, Long Exposures, Still Life, and Infrared Photography, a bit of over the top artistic stuff, and then back to the basics.

All challenges to make taking a photo interesting and challenging at the time.

Edit? Of course. Have fun with it. 
After all when the debate dust settles, I guess it all comes back to the photographer and what the Artist Photographer wants to portray.

I guess if you are going to take photos, you just need to enjoy what you are doing.