I am a retired engineer living in New Zealand, where my time is split between my Community responsibilities (I Chair Marlborough Citizens Advice and Vice Chair Volunteer Marlborough), and as a Community photographer. That just means I work for free providing a photographic service to Community organisations and not-for-profits. I also belong to, (and am currently President of) Marlborough Camera Club, which has some sixty enthusiastic members.
My approach to image making is that it’s the final image that matters, and I use every tool and process available to realize my ideas. As any working photographer knows, you don’t usually get to pick your time, and can’t always wait for the perfect lighting conditions, so you learn how to make the best of what you’ve got, and when possible, take control of the conditions if they don’t suite. So I carry several speedlites, and reflectors and scrims of various size, and I use every post processing trick I can learn or invent.
High Speed Sync with my Canon 580EX2s is a favourite tool, and e-TTL makes it oh so easy. HDR can produce wonderfully stylized sunsets, but it can also drastically improve shots where you could not avoid the midday sun. It also makes otherwise tricky interior shots a cinch. Photoshop is complex and provides many paths to the same end, but it has hidden depths that can make apparently difficult edit situations astonishingly easy. Close-up backgrounds, that you agonised on how to light properly, can be infinitely easier to fake with Photoshop.
Making life easy for yourself can engender surprisingly virulent opposition from photographic purists. They tend to take the view that it has to be done ‘in camera’, and Photoshop should only be used for minimal clean up of your photographs. Rearranging image elements is seen as cheating, and compositing in completely new elements akin to devil worship! I kid you not about this. I have been hounded and attacked relentlessly for daring to hold an alternative view.
Peerless Pixels will be a place where I can share what I have learned and invented. I hope it helps a few folk to realise their ideas.
Kia ora