One more week and then I get my second Covid-19 vaccination shot! Whoo Hoo! It looks like things are starting to open up some. LA County moved into the Orange Level which opened up restaurants to indoor dinning, movie theaters are open again, limited to selective seating but open nonetheless. Maybe, just maybe, we will be able to meet as a group again soon. I haven’t heard anything yet and as soon as I do I’ll let you know. So, for now, we will continue to use Zoom for our monthly meetings. We’ve been doing pretty well, averaging about 25 members every month. We also started “On Location” two months ago and it is getting more popular every month. Last meeting we had 14 members participate! This month we go to the Golden Valley Open Space on Placerita Canyon Road. It is about 2 miles east of the Nature Center parking entrance and parking for Golden Valley Open Space is on the North side of the street. There are several trails you can take, plenty of scenic things to photograph, wild flowers, birds and other wildlife. We will meet on Monday April 26th at 7 pm via Zoom to see everyone’s photographs, talk about how to improve them, etc.
I know plenty of you use Photoshop to edit your images, myself included. I kind of got in a Facebook fight last week when I commented on a photograph that the photographer made at a wedding. She had the bride, the groom and his groomsmen lined up for a photograph. The bride had a telephone pole sticking up right out of her head. The photographer asked for help removing the pole, said the she had spent two days trying to remove it in Lightroom then tried Photoshop and was unable to remove the pole. Two days! My response was “didn’t you see the pole when you took the photograph? If you would have moved everyone six feet to the left or the right, the pole would have been gone.” She responded “Oh I saw the pole, I just thought I could fix it in Photoshop.” Wrong answer!
As photographers it’s our job to get it right in the camera first! We need to look at everything in our frame, remove what we don’t want in there. Try to get everything we can correct in camera first, then make the photograph. Lightroom should be used for downloading your images, putting them into a catalog for filing purposes, then used as your editing software, cropping, dodging and burning, etc…Photoshop is best used for enhancing your images, making a good photograph better, not for fixing something that should have been corrected at time of capture. Removing a pole from someone’s head should have been done before hand, watching your background, making sure there are no mergers, poles, trees, wires, etc…that is what we do as photographers. We learn the craft, not only exposure wise, but also composition wise. Her excuse was “Well that’s where the bride wanted to be photographed!” Again a lousy excuse. You as the photographer need to to tell the subject, if we shoot here this pole is going to be sticking out of your or someone’s head, let’s take three steps to the right and the pole is gone. (There was nothing else in the background of this photograph which tells me that the photographer didn’t see it). Can you imagine shooting something like a wedding, having to make 800 or so images, then having to edit out poles, wires, trees etc….you’d be there for weeks trying to get the images useable. No thank you! Get as much as possible correct in camera first, then enhance your images if need be. I know I’d rather be shooting. Sitting in front of a computer all day and night editing images is not for me.
This month we welcome Justin Black as our guest speaker. Justin is from the Washington DC area and his presentation is called “Subtracting the Universe”. He will go over his thought process and share some of his favorite images. Justin used to run the Galen Rowell gallery in Bishop California. You can check out his website at:
justinblackphoto.com. We will start at our regular time of 6:45 pm. We’ll have Justin come on first, after his presentation we will see photographs from our members, some of which went to Death Valley National Park and visited the Eureka Dunes for a weekend. We will also have a discussion on getting away from the photojournalist aspect of shooting and making the move to more of an artistic level of photography using Photoshop to enhance your work.
Log in to see the Zoom link and password for the next meeting.
I’ll see you all on the 13th!
Keep shooting!
Kevin