Here's one of my favorites from my little photo odyssey yesterday.
Full disclosure--I played around a little bit with Picasa to enhance the colors and the contrasts, and I also amped up the fill light a little bit as well, I think.
As to my thoughts on photo editing debate (taking a note from
Akinoluna's earlier entry on the subject
here) -- well, I took a Black and White Photography class (that's film, by the way, not digital) in college, where I spent endless hours in the dark room wasting sheet after sheet of contact paper in what sometime seemed like a futile attempt at making the perfect print. Anyone who's never done that before and thinks that what is on the film just goes directly onto the paper with no editing -- in your dreams!
Like I said, I spent HOURS agonizing over the perfect exposure, making print after print with incremental differences, trying to get it as good as it could be. Now, they weren't usually huge changes, just things like:
cropping
lengthened/shortened exposure time
burning and dodging
You know, pretty basic stuff that EVERY photographer does/did (
burning: exposing one small part of the frame for longer than the rest to make a really light spot darker;
dodging: exposing the whole frame but blocking a small too-dark area from the light so that details can be seen). Ansel Adams was infamous for laboring over every detail of his prints in the darkroom, sometimes changing them into something almost unrecognizable from the original negative.
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make here is that I think making small edits to digital photographs like the ones I did to this one aren't cheating; they're simply following in a long line of photographers fiddling with their shots to get the best possible image out of what they took originally.
Now, people who do hatchet jobs by taking bits and pieces of several different photos to make one composite image, basically fabricating the image, is something completely different. It might be art, but it's not photojournalism. And for my intents and purposes, photojournalism is what matters. So none of my images will ever be anything but what I saw and photographed, with one or two small tweaks that doesn't affect the accuracy of the image.
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