About this Blog

Photo Writing is the web version of the Photo Writing mini-magazine produced by Limephoto and Emil von Maltitz since 2010. As of 2015 it is now completely online. Feel free to browse through the articles and please leave comments in the comments section if you would like to engage with us.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

A New Perspective


Creating images allows the image creator the unique opportunity to impress upon her viewer a particular way of seeing. We each experience the world in our individual ways, with individual perceptions, singular viewpoints and our own set of standards and understandings of the world. Pointing the camera and simply pressing the shutter does nothing more than make a visual recording of whatever it was that happened to be in front of the lens at the time. But, choosing the viewpoint and the perspective in a way that begins to convey a message turns a snapshot into a painting of light.
When I say a ‘painting of light’ I am explicitly referring to the fact that pictures are made, not taken. There is usually a conscious act in creating a photograph. It may be as simple as raising one’s camera phone to grab a snap. The point is that something caught the photographer’s eye and had enough interest to warrant that a picture be created, or taken. It’s one of the reasons why there has been a relatively lukewarm reception to life-logger cameras and the like. Thousands, if not millions of images, showing the mundane and banal of an individual’s every waking breath are simply not interesting. They may show a unique viewpoint of the world, but only if they are curated down to an important few frames (as a side note, consider how many images we as photographers have to sift through after a day’s shooting to get anything worthwhile from the dross - now imagine sifting through a hundred, or a thousand times more images, in an attempt to distil the essence of what we have experienced through pictures).


Friday, April 17, 2015

Colour Grading in Lightroom

 
Tweaking colour is one of the most difficult aspects of the post-production workflow. Some photographers avoid it entirely and just go with what they are given by the camera and the software that they opt to use. The problem with this approach is that each software developer comes up with their own recipe in interpreting pixel data in a RAW file into colour information in a bitmap image. So basically, what you see is not what you get.