For my photographer-friends, ASMP has announced what has already become my best resource for all things photographic… Take a look at dpBestflow, a site funded by the Library of Congress. Let me know what you think.

Then one of my photographer friends burned out rather quickly working for the Magazine I loved. I still anxiously read the articles and look with wonder at the terrific photographs in National Geographic Magazine but I now have a better understanding of the process than I did years ago.

This past Friday was a very rainy, fall day in the Chicago area. I used this as an opportunity to take some photos. I’ve always enjoyed shooting in the rain because a coating of water saturates the colors. The neutral color of a rainy sky adds a purity to the colors.

My goal was to shoot for no more than an hour, venture no farther than my yard and to come up with 10 photos that showed me something new.

Photography is much more about seeing than it is about taking photos. Familiar subjects seen in a new light become a different – even exotic world. (An hour in the rain could be miserable if this were not true.) Most of the hour was spend seeing; very little was spent shooting.

The images in this series are very straightforward in both composition and treatment. I opted to not use unusual angles or anything other than a “here it is” approach to shooting. I also used no Photoshop filters or any post-production tools other than an occasional use of curves to put the contrast back into sync with my eye.

I didn’t travel to faraway lands shooting these but I looked at each subject as if it were seen for the very first time. And I had a blast.

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Landscape #1

This is a horse chestnut tree leaf from my neighbor’s tree. I always have thought of these fallen leaves as a dirty brown color. This one was a beautiful surprise.

horse chestnut tree leaf

What had been “film, processing and scanning” on my estimates years ago are now billed collectively as “processing”. Although I don’t hear that from clients as often as I have in the past, some of my customers still wonder what it all means.

Rarely do images come out of the camera ready to go to print or to put on the web. In this photo of Dave Veerman, partner at the Livingstone Corporation, I used a generic fluorescent white balance setting on my camera. Having shot in the camera’s RAW format, I knew I could easily fine tune this later. Knowing that each room in which I shot this series of portraits would have a different white balance as well as mixed light sources, I opted to just come close with the white balance. Taking the time to try to perfect this in camera would have taken time away from the subjects. With mixed light sources, this was impossible anyway.

Below is the progression of the image from the in-camera RAW file to color and contrast-corrected file to final B&W file. (I aslo delivered a B&W version to the client hoping that they might use this for its corporate-warming effect.)

Camera Version

This is how the RAW file looked upon opening it in Capture NX. It was shot using a generic fluorescent white balance. The primary light source was an overhead fluorescent light. There was also light coming in from a window to the right.

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image as viewed RAW

Processed Image

In Capture NX I changed the white balance to indicate a fluorescent 3850º kelvin light source. This brought the entire image into a more natural-looking color balance including the artwork on the wall. Using curves I slightly increased contrast. I then removed a considerable amount of blue from the right side of the face that had received the daylight. The eyes were slightly brightened and the hand slightly darkened.

I then changed the resolution for web use and used unsharp masking to increase overall sharpness for this blog representation. It’s important to note that the type and amount of sharpening is dependent upon final output size and type. Each use requires very different sharpening criteria.

image as processed

Black & White File

There are an extraordinary number of options for black & white conversion. We rarely use a generic “convert to black and white.” For this image I used CS4 to create a relatively gritty look but one that I feel still conveys the feeling of warmth.

image processed as B&W

Okay, so all of this takes time and that is why we bill for processing. This is a tremendous value for our clients. We don’t consider any of this to be retouching. That will be discussed at another time.