filters
With the advent of mobile optimized tools like Instagram and Flickr and Hipstamatic and the such, a common grumble amongst professional communities is how they’re nothing but cheesy toys that are 'cheating' and 'not professional' and 'have taken the art out of photography’ and 'blah blah’.
I know.
I was one of those people.
Read MoreIt eventually happens to every new photographer. You’re out in the field. You’re setting up to make a shot, and you see others around you setting up for a shot, only, some of these people have these strange contraptions attached to the front of their lens. It looks like a huge piece of square glass. You sit there. You stare. You wonder. And when you get back home, you Google ‘square things on lens.’ The first time this happened to me, I was set up to shoot some images of Bonsai Rock in Lake Tahoe, California several years back.
Read MoreWhen most people think sharpening in Photoshop, they understandably default to the ’Sharpen’ or ‘Unsharp Mask’ filters. But since I learned this trick a few years back, I don’t believe I’ve opened a single one of Photoshop’s native sharpen plugins a single time. Instead, I’ve relied on one of the ‘Other’ filters in that ‘Filter’ menu -
Read MoreIt’s almost hard to ignore in today’s photography discussions. The ‘purist’ versus the ‘artist’ argument. What is a real photograph? What is a fake photograph? What is a photograph? When are filters and plugins appropriate? When are they not? When have you used too many?
Here’s the thing: never! None of that matters. At all. The only people it matters to are the people it matters to. Think about that sentence - The only people it matters to are the people it matters to. Basically, it’s not up to anyone but you to tell you what you like.
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