Today was wet, snow melting and rain failing, so I thought I’d try something else. I happened to see Abi looking out the Window and thought it would make a nice picture.

By the time I got out lights, the rain stopped, so I had to ask James to join me in the garden and point the garden hose at the window! The picture came out ok though.

Interestingly, since I have been posting images I’ve had a number of questions from people about Photoshop. So I thought I should comment.

Every single professional image that’s posted anywhere is Photoshoped. From magazines to billboards, post processing is here to stay. Now some people say that this doesn’t count as photography and consider it “cheating”. But even the famous Ansel Adams was a king in the darkroom and spent hours perfecting “dodging and burning” while images developed. Today, he would do this in Photoshop.

So what kind of things do I do in Photoshop? The answer depends on the image. At a minimum, every picture is sharpened and color corrected so it accurately represents what I saw. If necessary I can change everything, from color, tone, exposure, brightness and noise reduction to lens and distortion correction. If that’s not enough I can remove blemishes and wrinkles, smooth skin and even re-sculpture a face or body. I can also remove distractions and composite a fake image from multiple parts.

At the end of the day the goal is to create an image that draws you in, makes you think and insights some kind of emotion.

In reality I’m still learning how to do all this well. I have some successes but shoot thousands of images for a few nice ones (literally). And to be honest there are very few I personally like.

So what can’t Photoshop do? Well it can’t create a good composition if one wasn’t captured and it can’t regain complete darkness or blown out highlights. So you have to know what you’re doing with the camera in the first-place and know how to use ambient light and how to augment or replace it with your own.

Hopefully at the end of the day you end up with a picture that looks great.

Today’s image was sharpened and I added a small vignette (to make the corners a little darker and draw you in). Hope you like it.

We went out for Mexican tonight and I had a Margarita.  I turned my back for 30 seconds and found this scene…