Post processing photographs

I’ve always been averse to processing photographs. No doubt, post the processing, the photograph’s value and appeal might probably increase, but somehow I’ve always been extremely hesitant towards it. My argument is this: what is the point of taking a photo if you don’t want it to look like how it actually is? Why do we take photographs..to capture a moment for posterity, because you want to remember this moment for ever. Beacuse there is something striking at that time when you want to draw out your camera and shoot. The point is , if you thought the moment was worth capturing, why would you want to ‘enhance’ it? Doesn’t that become a different moment then? Obviously studio/portrait photography doesn’t come under my argument since that is a known fact, without post processing, studio/portrait photography might not even exist!

I think if you want to portray something differently, you just need to learn how you can capture it differently. Not take a picture and then apply the hundred odd options available in the various photo editing software. Seeing how complex some of this software is, I wonder sometimes if the photographer is claiming credit for knowing how to use the complex-until-you-learn-it tools apart from claiming credit for the photograph itself!

I’m not really talking about simple processing like increasing sharpness or contrast or reducing brightness. I guess you do need them sometimes, when you haven’t had enough time to set up your shot, or say you spotted an animal rather suddenly. The main post processing I do is cropping, which I think, doesn’t even belong to the category of processing. You’re just trimming your photo. And yes, I do change some of my pictures to black and white at times. Post procesing I agree is a boon (especially when you want to restore an old image), but I strongly feel, it should be used very judiciously. I don’t really want to look at some fab pictures and be awestruck, only to realise, it was an ordinary shot made extraordinary by running it through some software (even though you need to be smart enough to know what the software is doing and how it can change your picture). You want a good photograph, then learn to take a good one. Period.

An outing with birds!

A weekend gone wrong finally turned out not so wrong, in fact turned out quite right! We had a holiday on May 1 (Labour Day). It was a Thursday. So we’d decided to take Friday off to give us a 4-day weekend. All was planned. We were to go on a camping trip to a place near Shimoga. All of us were quite excited. On Wednesday evening, hubby darling announces that trip needs to be cancelled, ‘coz he has some very urgent work on Friday. I was totally dismayed and disappointed. So were the others (4 of our friends were joining us on this). I was also quite angry though I knew it wasn’t really his fault. Well, guess things like this do happen. It’s just awful when you’ve been looking forward to something and it doesn’t work out. So on Thursday I just got wasted…went out, did a long pending three hour book browsing and buying. It felt great. Then to feel even better, we went out for dinner and generally had a good time. Friday, to the surprise of my colleagues, I landed in office!! Anyway Saturday dawned…and hubby darling suggested we go to Mysore. We’d been thinking about doing some bird photography at some lakes in Mysore. This, we’d been promising ourselves from the time we’d got ourselves a new 70 – 300 lens for our camera. So armed with all the gear, we went to Mysore. Our first jaunt was Kukkarahalli kere (kere = lake ).

A shrike

The long tailed shrike is the first bird I’ve spotted, captured (on my D40) and made an id. It’s not a good shot, I know. Clearly it leaves a lot to be desired. But I also lack the right lens for it at this point. Nevertheless, I’m posting it here purely ‘coz I’m happy I atleast got this and think I’ve made the id correctly (hopefully!). 

(Spotted near Ooty)

Update: So my friend who’s into wildlife conservation, told me this bird may not be a long tailed shrike, but rather is a bay-backed shrike. Okkayyy!! See it here.

Thank god for recovery software!

Isn’t it utterly and absolutley frustrating when something goes wrong with the memory card in the camera and you lose all the photographs? It’s not about just losing data, it’s about losing memories, which is quite painful. After googling for photo recovery software, I mainly found a lot of licensed, have-to-buy-to-use softwares. A few of them misled me and when I downloaded their trial version, it tantalizingly showed a set of recovered pictures, but prompted me to buy before I could actually get the pictures back! It’s not that I didn’t want to buy, I’d have almost done it, except that I didn’t have my US credit card anymore. I’d have to call my friend there (wake her up in fact) and then make her buy it and send it to me. Considering the state I was in, I couldn’t wait for a few more hours to do that. I wanted my pictures back rightaway! So I continued installing trial versions of all the software I’d downloaded. At last, found one which not only recovered all my pictures, it recovered my previous trip’s deleted pictures too! (And it recovered more pics than all the other software I’d tried earlier). Basically none of the pictures are deleted from the card, only the links (actual path to the file) get removed from the file allocation table, so that new pictures can be linked. What the software does is, fishes out the actual path (and hence the picutre itself) of the un-linked files. Read this and this for more information. What a relief to get all my memories..uhh…pictures back!

p.s. During the interval spanning between losing them and recovering them, it was painful, how in my head, there was this slow motion repeat of all the good pictures clicked that were lost. You know, including all the details, of what happened before, during and after taking those pictures. My mind works against me  at times. <Sigh>