Awesome Photos

It’s obvious to most folks that technology has made many advances in the last 50+ years.   In the recording studio, for instance, artists would perhaps have to sing their songs many, many times in order to perfect things like tone and pitch.  Today, however, there are all sorts of gadgets that are used in the music studio to alter things.  A singer can sing flat or sharp and simply run their off-key voice through a tuner to make it sound as if they sang the song in flawless pitch.   A technique called “comping” is also common in today’s recording studio when a singer can belt out their song several times and then with the touch of the hand (or swing of the mouse) cut and paste the best parts of each track to meld it into one track, the best of all tracks, so to speak.

All the same goes for film.  In the days of Ansel adams, it was the reign of silver-halide photography.  There were many choice to be made about how a picture would be shot and developed.  All of this planning and execution took an immense amount of time and often trial and error.  Developing time and temperature are major variables when printing “old-school.” Swishing around a print in developer, for instance, could easily alter the degree of shadow and highlight in a particular photo and too much handling could destroy the image all together.  Add in the fact that all developing had to be done in complete dark.  Albeit to say that photo developing was and still is a fragile process and often painstaking.

Today things are a bit easier, to say the least.  Not to take the intensity out of choosing the best image out of 200 RAW images, but, it’s a lot easier than it used to be.   And, because of that, there are a lot more photographers out there today.   Thanks to a little LED screen on the camera, we no longer need to imagine how an image will be perceived.  If we don’t  like what we see, just hit the erase button right then and there and try another angle.   Come home, dump it all on the computer, and decide what to keep and what to throw away.  And then, when we’ve gotten it down to only the best of the best shots, well…maybe we’ll just open Photoshop and get those highlights pumped up.