"Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships." - 365 Project, Day 34

I've written before that I don't edit my pictures too much.  Though this is still true, for the most part, I don't know how long I'll keep that up.  I'm not too picky about the pictures I take, but sometimes the picture needs a bit of something.  As with any digital camera, dynamic range is always an issue.  If I owned a Phase One P65+ or even a Nikon D3X, I wouldn't even care, but with the equipment I have, I can't compete with those cameras on a few levels.

I'm very pleased with, say, the picture I took yesterday.  The blues were very nice before retouching the picture (and to be honest, I would have posted the before-and-after pictures had the three others forgotten to send their own pictures (as I thought might have happened because I got all three pictures pretty late in the day)).  I just wanted to give them a bit more punch.  The same goes for today.  In the LCD screen of my 7D, the picture was dark with very nice contrast.  On my laptop, it looked a bit brighter, making it seem more bland.  All I did what match what I saw when I took it.

There are those that say editing a picture is sacrilege (or perhaps something not so drastic), and though I can appreciate the care and finesse that goes into creating the perfect picture in-camera, I will say this.  When processing film, there is, well, processing going on.  To a certain extent, when creating a photo from a negative, you can control the exposure and can easily underexpose or overexpose certain areas you wish to hide or highlight.  At the very least, you control how dark or how bright the picture will be.  Editing digital pictures, in my mind, is just an extension of that.  Some people can go overboard, but the idea is the same.  You can control what you couldn't control when you took the picture.  Digital cameras are by their nature lacking something and all editing is doing is trying to reproduce the photographer's vision.

Today's pictures are next.

Frank

His note: I stopped by one of my favourite stores today, Home Depot, and some tubular carts were all lined up outside, I just had to take a few shots of them.  It's funny how people look at you when you're setting up for a shot like this.  They looked at me funny.  I suppose they were thinking: "what's that idiot doing?"  LMAO, I was having fun.

Mandy

Her note: Beautiful roses I was brought. :) I really like having them off to the side in this picture. The roses also look like velvet.

Shannon

Watermelon!  If you put this in a food dehydrator, would anything be left?

Pat

Right outside of work the sunset was very nice.  I really enjoyed the shape of the clouds and the contrast created by the uneven horizon.  I boosted the contrast and clarity a bit to give the picture a bit more punch.

I have the next two days off, so I will definitely be taking a lot of pictures.  Hopefully there will be at least two good ones.