I held a conversation with a young photographer (forty-five years younger than myself) a few days ago who had read some of my blogs and I am pleased to say he disagreed with a lot I said in them. So why if he disagreed with me was I pleased I hear you ask?
Simple as photography is not what I think about the craft (notice I didn’t say art) it is about what works and what pleases, pleases the photographer as well as the viewer. The latter being the ultimate purpose for “professional photographers” as if the buyer doesn’t like it you are not going to sell it are you or at the very least not get paid, which is not good at all is it.
During the conversation I had with this talented young man the much discussed subject of Photoshop came up with a throwaway line I so often hear of “Well you can always fix it in Photoshop” which I hate almost as much as “I can take better photos on my iPhone” almost but not quite my most hated comment. I must say I never, ever use Photoshop mainly because it is far too complicated for me, it is expensive and I was taught to put as much right in the camera as possible because on film there were limited thing you could do afterwards, even if they did have Photoshop which they didn’t.
I do have “photo software Affinity Photo” and I do use it for the simple reason I shoot in Raw and if I intend to sell my work in Prints I store the as tiff files, if I intend to send them via email or for my site it is jpeg files so I do need the software for the digital age.
After pointing this out to my young friend he came to the conclusion that I wasn’t the dinosaur he thought I was and I even gave him food for thought even if I did do “old photography” and that maybe it wasn’t a great idea to take a few hundred photographs of something and the spend hours on end in Photoshop editing his work. Something for him to think about and no matter how talented he was working in Photoshop there were hundreds of even more talented people who could do a better job than him and as his times was expensive and for a fraction of the price he could find somebody to do the work. My LinkedIn profile is the living proof of that.