Cameras are the weakest link

How easy is it to just point, shoot and print?
Thanks to new technology advancing rapidly, it’s becoming easier and easier to take pictures and create usable images.

But what technology can’t do are the 2 most important parts to make an amazing image.

1) Know/create what you want to shoot, compose it and light it. (the bit before)
2) Once you have your image, post-process it properly to maximise it’s impact (the bit after)

If you have your camera in auto mode like most point and shoots then it’ll try to figure out the right exposure and white balance for you. This is almost never the creative’s option (at least not for me) as you have virtually no control of the results.
What it will do is make a guesstimate and give you something to look at, although it may not be what you had in mind.

Below is an example of a point and shoot image which I processed into something usable

Image courtesy of Andrew Winton

This image was taken by my dad on a recent winter holiday. Not a bad way to spend Christmas Eve 🙂

He requested that I print it for him on a large canvas for his birthday (via Canvas My Art) and on initial viewing it looked like I could make something of it. It had interesting compositional elements, but it wasn’t lit so well (nothing a reflector couldn’t fix) and the JPG file I was given was big enough to work on to minimise loss of quality during editing.

It’s easy to see the difference that my simple changes made in post-production. It’s often the area that people overlook or assume it’s not important, but as you can see it can really make or break an image.

As a professional image maker I’ll try to get it right in-camera so that the (sometimes hundreds of) images I edit only require minor adjustments. The quicker we can edit the quicker we can get out there and make more images.

But, no matter how far advanced or (in)expensive our camera are, only having skill and vision in all areas will consistently return quality results.