For the client.

What could be a better afternoon/evening than sitting in a beautiful cafe in a small New England town editing a clients shoot? Well, for me, I can not think of a better way to spend a few hours working. The fall foliage falls around me as I sit tediously removing elements of a shirt to get a nice solid color instead of the Halloweenish pattern that was on the shirt to begin with. In between the path selections of the candy corn, I find myself reminiscing this past summer. How quickly autumn has come. The days are getting shorter, but the work load is growing. A few projects have been lined up. Next weekend I will be exhibiting some photographs at a one day event in Holyoke, Mass. The photographs are from a project I began working back in April of this year. Over the past few months the project took quite a few turns and ended up becoming a pretty interesting body of work.

As the project is coming to an end, shooting and editing wise, I am also thinking about the little things that have been involved in the final product. I started my work load this afternoon by removing elements of a design from shirt. Which has now lead me to removing distractions and objects from one of the photographs that is part of the exhibit and a special request piece for my other client. Removing objects in photoshop, for the most part, is fairly easy. However, thinking back to the shoot, I remember thinking to myself, I should ask for that bag to be removed. Nothing wanting to prolong the shoot to stop, recompose, and remove elements from the space, I kept shooting. Now, I wish I had taken the extra few seconds then to remove the bag. As a few extra seconds on that day would have spared me about 30 minutes today. So, the moral of the story, yes it maybe easy to remove things in photoshop during post production, but it is much more time and budget effective to control this while shooting and remove the distractions before the photographs are made.

Getting back to the shirt with the candy corn and other elements, this is a far more complicated post production clean up than removing a bag. It was requested that the shirt be worn, however, upon viewing the images, it became apparent that the shirt wasn’t as flatter as one thought to be. Is this a problem? Not by any means at all. This is merely a contrasting point to show the difference between being able to control what elements can be removed before a photograph is made vs. when a photograph is made and the elements or objects need to be removed. A case in point like this, the shirt looked good, but within the context and composition of the photograph, the shirt is not as flattering. A situation like this commands a certain level of retouching and post processing be done to remove the elements and objects.

My piece of advice, remove the objects and elements that are within your control before you shoot to condense the time invested in post production clean up. After all the point of post production and editing your final images is to give them your essence, not to collect and remove trash. And when you’re given a request to remove objects from a shirt, then understand that this was and is a situation that wasn’t as easily foreseen. I am always happy to explore edits like cleaning up a shirt. It has given me a few creative ideas to work with.

 

 

Vega Yoga     Holyoke, Massachusetts