Do you ever feel held back with your Photography?

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I have to say I’m feeling a little held back at the moment with my photography and in particular my camera.

I’ve got to the stage where I know I need to be able to adjust the settings for exposure to capture a better photograph, but I have no way of doing that. Because I’ve got a very low end point and shoot camera which is really great for snap shots of friends and family, but no good if I want to go a little deeper. The camera I use at the moment is a Traveler DC-5080 and it has taken what I feel are some good photographs. But if I had a camera that was more flexible then could I have made them even better?

I’ve felt this way for a while and I have been thinking about a solution, which only comes to one answer which is to buy a new camera. I could look at how I am taking the shot and consider the natural lighting that I have to work with, which I do at the moment but at the end of the day the camera itself is still limiting me. It’s just the natural time to move on to the next stage. After all if you enter a race with a Ford Fiesta you are not going to do as well in it as if you had entered it with a Jaguar, are you…

So the hunt is on and the decisions are being made and weighed in the search for an upgrade to my camera, which has served me well and will continue as my back up.

I have even been using Photoshop Elements 3 to give my images a helping hand. Which is something I’ve never really done before. I’ve used Elements more for resizing and cropping in the past, but I have been experimenting with it to see how I can improve the images, and I’ve had some pleasing results.

This is good for learning photoshop skills, which I do think has it’s place as part of the process of creating an image. But I just need that bit of flexibility in the first place to give me more creative freedom. I don’t know why but I feel like I’m betraying a trusted friend!

Mandy

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Camera Colour Features v’s Photoshop

My camera has an option to change the colour settings of the camera to full colour, black & white or sepia. So I went out to give them a try as I have’nt used them before. These three photographs are the result. It was a dull day and it was raining so I picked a subject that was full of colour to give greater contrast.

I used to sometimes shoot in black and white film on my old camera so it’s nice to be able to just flick between the two (colour and black and white) whenever I feel like it.

Although the detail is good I don’t think I would shoot a lot in sepia unless for a specific need.

But if shooting in black and white or sepia solely and not using colour for that subject then there is no turning back.

Once you get home you can’t add the colour again so it’s something to think about.

But you can always shoot in colour (as well) and then change it later in Photoshop, or is that cheating!

Photoshop

These next three photographs have been produced in Photoshop Elements, the black and white and sepia anyway. So you can compare the two sets of photographs.

The full colour photograph is in RGB colour.

The black and white one has had the colour removed in the colour adjustment palette.

And the sepia one has been created in the colour adjustment palette by adding blue and red.

If you were comparing all six photographs together I don’t think you could guess which was which if you didn’t know beforehand. The first three look a little sharper but that could be the subject, to properly compare I should have used the same photo but I thought that would look a little monotonous.

So I think it’s down to a question of taste - camera or Photoshop (whichever version you prefer). I think I would choose photoshop because it gives a bit more flexibility, but that’s easy to say as I have used it a lot.

But one thing I will say is the Photoshop Elements produced photos uploaded to my blog a lot quicker than the ones that were produced on the camera.

Mandy

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