What You See Isn’t Always What You Get

What You See Isn’t Always What You Get

by William Lulow

The reason for paying attention to detail when dealing with any photographic project is that your final product is what gets perused carefully by your audience. Viewers of your work are impressed by what they see. Obviously, photography is a visual medium, so it pays to put everything you can into what you eventually show. That means you have to examine carefully every millimeter of the image you intend to publish. (Publishing means showing your image(s) in any form be it on the internet or in a gallery, or just on your wall at home.) You also need to think about what you want to say with each image. So, the closer you can come to your original, intended concept, the stronger will be the impact of your photograph. Here is a case in point. I had made quite a few images on a recent trip to Hawaii with the intention of doing work on them when I got back. One is of this Ti plant I saw on Maui. This was the original:

Now this wasn’t bad, but I had a much more vibrant and colorful image in mind when I actually made the exposure. I knew I wanted detail on the flower itself, so I added some light from the camera’s built-in flash. But the image here still didn’t have enough color or contrast. I began to work on the picture several weeks after we got back and came up with this image:

In terms of color this was much closer to what I had envisioned when I made at first, but maybe just a bit too saturated.

This was more what I had in mind. The post work on this entailed selecting just the flower, increasing the hue & saturation a bit as well as the brightness and contrast to give the flower some “pop” value. The one above it, I also worked on the sky a bit more, but perhaps a bit too much. This one appears to be a bit more natural-looking and the flower has some luminescence to it.

I use the camera’s built-in flash to add just a bit of fill-in light to a scene, but not necessarily for a portrait. This was a perfect way to use it because the flash, itself doesn’t dominate the scene. Now maybe the intensity of the flower could have been achieved by masking it in Photoshop and then playing with the saturation values. But, as much as working with the image in post-production is somewhat easier, I have always preferred getting it right in the camera. Sometimes, however, the final result necessitates a combination of techniques working together to make a spectacular image.

This is one other time I used a flash fill-in outdoors, but I set the flash on a light stand to the left of the camera position:

Here, I wanted the subject’s face to stand out against the sunset sky and I wanted to show that he was a bridge worker by the dirt on his jeans and the hard hat. Also, it was getting a bit late in the day because I wanted to catch the sunset over the city which provided a silhouette of the bridge so that it would be a bit more graphic. So, the light on the subject stood out in comparison to the bridge.

Here is another example of what you could do in post-production. The original did not have any clouds as you can see. The sky was a solid color gray so it lent itself to having another image dropped into it for a more dramatic effect. In addition, the image was reproduced with color on black&white. The monochrome cloud formation made the resulting image much more powerful.