toxdoc42 wrote:
I was taught to attempt to have all of my photos complete in the camera and to use my darkroom skills in to make good prints, but to depend on those skills to fix things I couldn't control in the camera. My classes all stressed that, and even limited my ability to use cropping. With digital, it appears that very often the dependence is the opposite. The trend seems to be to enhance the photographic image in post shooting. Often that changes what the actual vision of a scene was. This does make photography more like painting, but makes me wonder about all of the courses I took in the past.
I was taught to attempt to have all of my photos c... (
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I'm self taught, so I never got that brainwashing. However, I did learn to use slide/transparency film, after learning black-and-white. I learned VERY quickly that when using 'chrome films, I had to do EVERYTHING at the camera except, perhaps, push the film a stop. That meant getting the light right — ratio, color filters, flash, other kinds of
fill, reflectors, flags, color temperature meter... Whatever you wanted to do, you did it at the camera. Composition for slides must be done in the viewfinder! Yes, I had a great slide duplicator for multi-image work, but film duplicates of slides always gained contrast...
So getting it right at the camera for slides was good discipline — for recording great JPEGs!
Working with raw files is much like working with color negative film. You can get most anything you want from it, after the fact, including great B&W. OR, you can choose to record raw images with the menu settings most appropriate for the scene, and save yourself time in post production by getting close to what you want, at the camera.
Either way, there's no sin in finishing your visualization in post. Never was, except in the classroom, where the dogmatic instructors knew you would gain efficiency and quality if you paid the upfront price of attempting perfection at the start. Discipline and understanding and process are all worth something, as I learned the hard way.
These days, lots of folks figure there's so much latitude with raw capture, they'll just fire away in some auto mode and fix it later. Are they wrong? No. Just taking risks that may bite them on the butt every now and then.
All those rules they teach you in class? They're useful, but also crap. They give you perspective on the craft, but they can be barriers to creativity as well. Don't let them trap you. There are no rules, just math and the laws of physics. Go make great images.