Photographers

[free2wander]

My first camera was a gift for my 9th birthday in 1954. One of the brownies with a detachable flash (used bulbs) and 127 film. when I was about 12 an Aunt loaned me a junker Korean 35 (Pigeon), and the rest is history. All I could do was dream until I saved enough to buy a Yashika J-& with built in meter. Wow! I was uptown. After a few thousand rolls of film, I graduated to the Nikons of the 70's and 80s. Finally in the mid 80s, after running a camera shop, studio and doing a lot of teaching, I burned out! From 1985 to 2002 I didn,t touch a camera. In 2002 my brother in law put a fuji S2Pro in my hands and all of my Nikkor lenses mounted right on it.

This year I retired to full-time on our motor home and decided ego be damned and vowed to get rid of the Safari vest with its 20 to 30 lbs. of lenses and accessories. The trade out...a Fuji Finepix HS20 with a built-in 22mm-720mm lens that allows me to do more than all of the weight I was carting around. And with the built in lens, I don't have to miss any shots because I was too busy switching lenses! I do mostly landscapes and macro work of flowers and bugs, but have a fairly wide category list on my website at http:www.dickmott.com .. Check it out.

[jdcollins]

I try to get it right in the camera the first. However, I don't mind and frequently make tweaks using Aperture or CaptureNX. I try to make the image on the screen or print look like what I believe I saw with my naked eye.


Joe

[Birddogman]

I'm not sure that I'm good enough to wrap myself in the label of "Photographer", but I do enjoy taking photographs and making what I considered to be pleasing (and maybe even occasionally artistic) images. Of course, I try to capture the best possible image with the camera, but I also enjoy working with the images.

Being a very early adopter of the digital technology, I started with the very first version of Adobe Photoshop Elements. Over the years, I messed around with other programs, but always returned to Elements. I updated my Elements programs as newer and far more sophisticated versions came out over the years. Finally, I moved up to the "full" Photoshop program and currently use Adobe Photoshop CS5 as my primary tool. I also use Lightroom, but not as much as Photoshop.

Generally, I don't make radical changes in the images. Instead, I try to manipulate the image so it shows what I saw in my mind's eye when I took the shot. Here are a couple of examples.

This is my older dog, Maggie hard at work trying to find some birds on a bitterly cold winter day, as the shot came out of the camera - not a very impressive image, nor was this what I "saw":



This was the finished image - I felt it now conveyed much better what it was really like being afield on that bleak day:



Here's another example. Chase and I were hunting pheasants in overgrown ag fields when we got blasted with a big thunderstorm - everything was soaked and then the sun burst through in a narrow, sharp beam for only a few seconds and it highlighted the brightly colored fall leaves and each blade of grass glistened. Just as fast it was gone and everything was flat again, but I had captured this image:



In the refined image, the distracting element of Chase's blaze orange e-collar is removed, there was a lot of subtle work with curves and other variables. In general, I think the viewer gets a much more accurate "feel" of what it was like to be there when that sunbeam broke though the swirling black clouds for a brief moment.



Once in a long while, I will create an image that never actually existed in nature, just for fun:





FWIW, I don't recommend the full Photoshop program for anyone other than graphic image professionals. It is expensive and does much, much more than I need. I wanted to learn the program and I did, but I don't feel it's worth the effort for someone who just likes photography a side-activity/hobby. I'd recommend the latest Elements program instead - chances are it will do everything you want and far more as well.

[Diwizi]

Canon digital.... DH and i both have DSLR's dif bodies but we share lenses.... No that isnt sexual........ Economical..... We are both retired and on second marriages and both of us have always liked photography..... this gives us just one more shared interest.... I am on my 5th digital but first dslr..... Second slr for each ..... We have both done the processing our own film in prior lives.....Oh we both are computer people also..... I use my camera mainly to have my own reference photos for my main passion watercolor painting.... So i like the flexibility i have with digital..... Last year i taught watercolor on a Med. Cruise and came home with about 50,000 photos..... I might never use them, but have them if i want them.... For now i am have them all saved on an external hard drive as well as on memory cards....

[Ramblin]

For the budget minded, everyone should give GIMP a try. Very powerful image manipulation software with lots of built-in enhancements and filters. Best feature: It's free.

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program