Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Ten Biggest Safari Mistakes and Lessons...Number Three

Lesson number three...This is the easiest and yet the hardest lesson of them all.


First shoot in raw. Stop shooting in jpegs! Jpegs are compressed files to begin with and every time you edit them, you lose even more image clarity. Every time you edit a jpeg, it is like passing a handful of sand from one person to another to another. At the end of the line, the product isn't the quality that it started with. With Raw images, you can edit them a million times if you like. If you don't like what you did, it is simple to start again from scratch. Sometimes, I look at pictures that I edited four years ago and think "I didn't do that picture justice, or I think of a technique that may make the picture look more appealing.
Mother and daughter elephant in
Tarrangire National Park, Tanzania
Having fun with sepia. Same picture,
different interpretation.
Second, learn to use photoshop and lightroom and/or other types of editing software. We are in the digital age and part of digital photography is digital editing. 


One of the great things about photography is the option to continue learning and never master. There are always new techniques to learn and different ways of viewing and interpreting what you are seeing. Photography also provides a wide spectrum of ways to capture experiences and moments that you can celebrate, record and recall for the rest of your life; and beyond your time, potentially touching lives for years after you are gone.

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