The next couple of blog posts contain information from an amazingly talented and experienced Australian Photographer - Peter Eastway.

Peter is a Grand Master of Photography with the AIPP achieved over many decades as a professional photographer. He is also the editor of Better Photography Magazine. More about that and a competition he runs in future blog posts.

This time I just wanted to share an excerpt that Peter wrote about photography process. For those that have done my Camera Photography Workshop, you will know I mention right at the start about taking control of our camera and what it does for us. Putting it on auto is like telling your kids to just go do whatever you want!! Controlling everything from focus to exposure to automatic camera menu settings to composition, it all makes sense to achieve a better photo. Below are some words from Peter that back this up. 

Photography is a two-step process: capture and post-production. Some critics unfairly suggest that you don’t need to take a good photo, all you need is a program like Photoshop that can fix up your images. Obviously these critics have never used Photoshop as image editing software requires skills of its own.

And these critics are quite wrong when they suggest you don’t need to take a good photo in the first place. A photo can only be as good as the weakest link in the chain of processes that lead to its completion. You will struggle to make a good photograph in post-production if you start with a poor capture.

For instance, if you haven’t focused on your subject, how are you going to solve this in Photoshop? If your exposure has blown out the highlights, how do you recover them in Lightroom? If the camera has a very high ISO setting, how will you remove the noise? The capture process is fundamental to photography. When the manufacturers sell us a new camera, the advertising suggests that all we need to do is press the shutter button and to some extent this is correct. Technology has made photography very easy.

However, if we rely solely on the camera, we are also at the mercy of decisions made by faceless technicians and designers back at the camera factory! There are lots of assumptions made when designing automatic exposure modes that may or may not suit our purposes. To have complete mastery over the final result, we need to take control of every step of the photo process, beginning with capture.

I hope you found that information useful. I always enjoy reading Peters stories and information.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about photography process. You can email me HERE.

Here's some links where you can find out more about Peter Eastway. Also search and give him a like on IG and FB. It's well worth signing up for his Better Photography newsletter also.

https://www.petereastway.com/
https://www.betterphotography.com/