
This blog is the first of three (or possibly four) posts that are inspired by questions asked about my images. Most of these questions come from visitors to my art festival tent where I display several prints of various sizes and mediums. Most are printed on canvas because I really like the effect of the canvas texture on many of my images. And that is where the questions come in. The most frequent one is "Is that a photograph?" Following my response "Yes", the next question is often this one, "But you paint on it, right?" This may go on for awhile and in fact, one visitor argued with me about it. She did not want to believe my print was a photograph and not a digital rendering or a painting! And then quite often the discussion turns to post-processing software, such as Lightroom and Photoshop. "You Photoshop it, right; because it really didn't look like that for real, did it?"
So, I thought it might be of interest to some (both customers and photographers) to learn how I process a specific image and to see it in its original form. I'm going to begin with an easy one, titled "Playful" (see above). Playful was shot on Biscayne Bay at approximately 8:25 AM on February 9, 2015. For the photographers, the camera settings were f9, ISO 100, shutter speed 2 seconds. Neutral density filters were used with a 16-50mm lens and the scene was shot at 16mm.
The raw version (the file right out of the camera) did not look so much like the final version. Want to see what it really looked like? Read on and learn how I transformed Playful from beginning to end.