Little Fluffy Clouds

Nikon D70 @ 44 mm, 1/1250 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200
Previous : Current : Next

One of my favourite shots from the other day when I went for a walk by the Wandle after work. Love the contrast between the clouds and the wire, and also the 3 clear levels of depth of field. I'm also a fan of the colour processing on the clouds, something I learnt from a fortuitous accident when processing the Golden Ark shot.

I showed my gallery to someone today, who said that in some of the shots it was obvious they'd been played with in Photoshop. In fact with the exception of my Venice Originals set, ALL my shots online are processed in some way via Photoshop.

To be fair he really wanted to see what the D70 was capable of producing 'straight out the camera', but it reminded me of a thread I was reading on DPReview recently about whether processing photographs heavily in Photoshop is 'cheating'. To cut a long story short, I don't think it is if you create a look that you like, artistically speaking, and that's what I tend to do 99% of the time.

Very occasionally I fix things I don't like, such as cloning or healing out specks of dirt or something else tiny but distracting. I might fix shadows/highlights where they've underexposed/overexposed, but that's no different to dodging and burning in a wet darkroom, and I often boost colours to make them 'pop' pleasingly to my eye, but that's nothing like the airbrushing that goes on in magazines. That I consider cheating.