Admin's Blogs

It's funny that with the Digital Camera era how things have changed in photography.

In my early days shooting film and slides, you took the shot and and everything in that picture is there nothing removed from that image at all, and yet when others looked at your slides and photographs the wow factor was there and no one complained about anything being distractive in the photograph. Sure you had more control if you did your own black and white film or colour by Dodging and Burning but this was the limit of editing your prints. You could not remove content from those prints.

Then along came the digital cameras that allowed you to edit your images remove content from them. The big question that I always look at is how much is too much? I'm sort of old school on this and like to leave as much in the image that I took as that is the way that the camera seen things. So what happened to why we need to clone out this and that, or remove a part of the image with content aware. Well this all comes from those that are new to photography and probably never owed a film camera and jumped right into a digital camera, took some courses or learned from others that the way to make the image better is to clone out, and or use content aware editing to make that picture better that the original looked like.

So for those that used film cameras and have moved over to the digital age now have to keep up with the younger generation as this is the now the considered the standard process. You use the Internet allows us to put up our images on sites like here and others can view and comment on your images. How many times have you heard the word Clone Out with a comment on your image, plenty of times I bet as well the word Crop comes into play a lot as well. Things are so subjective to us all, and some will like the image, well others don't and that is the fun part of photography in general and the point here is that we learn from others and there point of views on our images. You may not always agree with the comments but that is OK, the image is yours and the way you present it is the way that you see it.

So how much is to much depends I guess on the image in the first place and what is considered distracting? Again this is subjective to us all. A good case in point, I had put a few images on another system of some bird shots that I took, and the comments on these images had been about 50 50. The questioning of the birds beak was the comments and some did not like the stuff that was on the beak and others did not mind. A little thing like this gets centered out of all things stange but true. Why so picky I will never know, but I came back with a reply and said that I liked it the way it is as it adds character to the bird and shows that the bird was eating seeds of some sort. The replies back were I never really thought of it that way and that was a good point on my part.

Really there is no bad or good way of saying how much is too much it is all up to you and how you look at your own image and what you want to remove from it. For me I try to look more at the crop of the image than looking at this should have been cloned out. Look more at the content rather than pick out the areas that should have been cloned out or not. Some people are just out there looking for an image to tear apart, and you take the comments for what is worth and just let it slide by.

So when you work on your images and you are going to clone out parts of it, please just remember to take your time at doing it, but do it right and making the changes seemless as possible. There is nothing like doing some changes and one look and you can see the flaws of your editing, just pratice on images every time you have a chance to perfect your skills. I do this even today, see an image that I have never posted and try to edit it again with the new skills i've found that I can now post that image where before I would have never thought of posting it.

Enjoy!