Opinions, Rules, and Editing

When I first fell in love with digital photography, I was thrilled to create images.  I found a scene that I appreciated, pressed the shutter button, printed the photograph, mounted it in a scrapbook or frame, and enjoyed it.  As I learned more and more about photography, I began to get concerned by opinions, bound by rules, lost in editing.   I exposed to the right so that I could capture as much detail as possible, forgetting the actual look of the exposed scene.  I edited for hours in Lightroom or Photoshop, trying to turn the image from what it was into what I thought others thought it should be, forgetting the true colors of the sunrise.  My love of photography started because I could literally record a moment.  I used to say that I didn't edit my images because I didn't want to change them.  In all honesty, I didn't edit my images then because I didn't know how.  But, now, I do.  And you know what?  I kind of want to get back to recording images as a moment, not as a sketch of something I could turn into artwork later.  Life is art.  Nature is art.  And while a few edits are necessary, and enhancements are wonderful, I want to leave behind a legacy of images that are clean depictions as the world as I know it.

The above image is essentially unedited.  I did remove a few dust spots from the sky and straightened my ever crooked horizon line.  But the colors are real, the exposure is what I saw that morning.  Yes, my highlights are blown.  But, they certainly were blown and blinding as I stood on the beach that morning watching the sun crest the horizon.  Some will say it's boring.  Some will criticize the placement of my horizon line.  Some could say I should have done __.  I could have sat at my computer and spent time adjusting the colors, lightening the shadows, darkening the highlights, playing with the contrast.  But instead, I chose to keep the photograph as close to the moment as possible.  This time when I found the scene, I metered and adjusted my settings, made a few basic edits, and enjoyed it.  After all, mine is the only opinion that matters and rules were made to be broken.