Post-processing. An important step (to me)

To illustrate why I do think post-processing is an important step in developing your digital photographs, I will first let the images speak for themselves here...

Click on the images for larger and better view

The left image is the photo as it comes straight out of the camera after shooting the scene, as you can see there's not much information there, poor lights, tones and colors and there's a lot of black (pitch black) without any information or details.

However, by shooting in RAW format, you make the software able to recover the maximum of light, shadows and details, just see for yourself (post-processing under Adobe Lightroom).

This is a belgian landscape taken during the golden hour, thus giving you this amazing warm atmosphere... Information was not lost even though the first image is way too underexposed!

ISO 200 - 36mm - f/5.0 - 1/4000s

Can't decide? When in doubt, keep them!

As digital photographers, we have this opportunity of shooting a lot of pictures without worrying about development costs or poor quality photographs except maybe for the space on your hard drive (which can be tremendous). Should this be an advantage or not, if you shoot loads of pictures (like me) and can't really decide wether to keep a photo or not in your collection... keep it and process it on another day!

I often shoot at anything, not that I take thousands of images each time but I rarely go out, take one or two single pictures then go back to the computer for post-processing. At the end of a big day I might end-up importing hundreds of pictures into Lightroom and of course, I will not keep them all. Some (many?) of them are usually unworkable or even useless and are for sure to be deleted and forgotten (yes, sad end for them).

Lately, I've been focusing quite a lot on landscape photography but as I didn't move a lot (I stayed in the same region), I made many similar shots and couldn't decide which ones were keepers and which ones to get rid of. I usually start by getting rid of crappy shots and keeping those I'm 100% sure I want to keep. However, there are some doubts for the rest... "I already have that kind of image", "It's very similar to the other one I kept", "Hmm not sure what to do about these" and this goes on and on. This is exactly what happened here for those three images.

I kept them and I'm glad I did it. At first, I was not sure how to process them, I turned the first one into black and white which worked fine (in my opinion) as the mountains are sharp and contrasty. The second one with the birds was just not one of my favorites and after working on it, I simply liked it. And same story for the third photograph. All of these three photos were taken in South of France, close to the Pyrenees mountains. That was a nice journey...

Another day, another mood, fresh inspiration :-)

Image #1: ISO 800 - 115mm - f/5.6 - 1/640s

Image #2: ISO 800 - 63mm - f/5.0 - 1/640s

Image #3: ISO 400 - 31mm - f/11 - 1/160s

Panorama, why you should keep your focus steady

Photography is a huge (fantastic) world and a way of learning photography is also making mistakes, trials and errors. I didn't upload that panorama of Saint-Lizier before because I made a mistake by not keeping the focus the same during the whole photo shooting process but finally decided to upload it to share with you that little tip.

So, what's wrong with this panorama? Let's have a closer look at the picture...