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Posts for: marcshapiro55
Jul 8, 2018 08:37:02   #
Fascinating question that I quietly wrestled with for the past 15 years. (Incidentally, I thought that @peterff made some excellent points, and I will try not to repeat what has already been said.) In order to fully appreciate my perspective, I need to give you a little of my history with photography.

I have been serious about photography for the last 40 years, but I would not call myself a serious photographer. I am not a professional; just a committed amateur.

In the prehistoric days of film, I was a Canon guy. I owned two Canon SLRs in my first 20 years. They were magnificent machines producing crisp, beautiful images of everything I photographed. I experimented with film, slides, black-and-white and infrared. In the thousands of images I took on film, there was one recurring theme: by and large, my photographs were terrible! I was young and poor, and the worst part of it all was the cost of film and developing.

By the time digital emerged, I was out of school, working and had some disposable income. I was fascinated with the digital medium because of the instant feedback and unlimited “free“ images. However, the ultra-low resolution and lack of features suggested that digital was nothing more than a toy and would likely disappear. (Whew! Was I wrong about that!)

In 1998, when Sony crossed the resolution line into the 0.3 MP (300 K) territory, I jumped in. With that, my 500–600 images annually grew to 2,000-3,000. What was most significant about my move to digital, and what kept me going with 10 digital cameras over the next 20 years, was the consistent improvement in my images. Digital gave me the immediate feedback to learn about lighting, composition and (old school) special effects. But back to your question.

Now a veteran of numerous point-and-shoot cameras (Sony, Fuji, Canon and Nikon) I most recently committed to a Sony alpha a7II, which is full-frame and mirrorless. (I shunned the earliest DSLRs because of a technology quirk which caused a momentary blackout when the shutter was triggered.)

Why mirrorless in my case? The answer is simple: weight and convenience. I get all the benefits of a DSLR without having to commit to the weight and bulk of that equipment. As one of the posters below indicates: you will never see a Hell’s Angel on a minibike. However, a Hell’s Angel is identified by his motorcycle; I am not identified by my photographic equipment. (You also won’t see a Hell’s Angel taking his motorcycle into a restaurant, or carrying it around Disney World.)

My goal is to take great images, but the world’s immediate perception of me as a serious photographer has nothing to do with the quality of my images. Just look at all the terrible film images I took for 20 years!

My conclusion, therefore, is that you should serve your objectives. If you want great quality images, just about any camera today (even point-and-shoots) can give you that result. But the subject/composition/balance is up to you. If you want to be a Hell’s Angel photographer, grab yourself the biggest, heaviest and loudest equipment you can find.
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May 17, 2017 02:42:45   #
Photoshop, PS Elements, Lightroom, Corel, Phocus, ACDSee,... Your head will explode just trying to identify all the options! I spent years sifting through different software in search of a program that could do everything what I wanted, and in that time I had to learn a lot of new programs. Ultimately, I found that many of the programs function similarly with similar commands -- Photoshop and the "PS clones" were my focus, although I dabbled in ACDSee which I liked enough to purchase after my free trial. (ACDSee offers some features that Photoshop did not at the time.)

I knew that Photoshop was the Mother of all Editing Software, but it was sooo not intuitive! I was spoiled by Microsoft Office and the "business productivity" software which featured a common set of commands. "How hard can it be," I asked myself. The truth is that I think it's nearly impossible to learn Photoshop on your own. So I decided to immerse myself in the program, took a few days off from work, combined the time off with a short vacation and enrolled in a Photoshop class at the Palm Beach Photography School. That was 2000 and I've never looked back.

Personally, I love Photoshop. I've barely scratched the surface but I now have a strong foundation in the basic skills to do almost anything. I ESPECIALLY have the ability to teach myself new techniques with the assistance of youtube.

My conclusion... if you have the money to spend Photoshop is the gold standard, and the monthly subscription with automatic updates is the way to go. You're better off spending $9.99 a month (which will give you automatic updates) than whatever the others might cost to purchase. Besides, after a few years, "the purchased programs" will be woefully outdated. (I owned PS v3 which I used faithfully until PS moved to the cloud subscription model (v9?), and then I switched. It was like buying a current model car after driving the same car for 15 years. Wow!) If you don't want to sign on to a lifetime of payments, try ACDSee. it's affordable and offers a huge spectrum of tools and options.

Finally, no matter what you decide to do, take a class. And I mean a real, in-person, class with a human being (not just youtube). You will actually learn from a human teacher and the discipline of sitting in a room is superior to youtube-based learning. Youtube is great, but you will have to demonstrate the commitment to actually sit through the lessons, and the videos tend to be inconsistent.

Here's a simple example of a photoshop-manipulated image that used to make a postcard I sent to my young son when he was at summer camp a few years ago.


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