After taking nearly 65,000 photos in one year (boy I am glad that is not all on ONE camera x.x) I think its time to try and tone things back for 2025, and try something new. There will be no more daily photo "requirement" but I will still enjoy going out and doing photo walks when I can as the weather is cooperative; it is my primary source of exercise and keeping active and not sitting at a computer all day (since that is what I do for my day-job).
The challenge I am going to do to try and get back to the basics of photography this year will be to have a daily carry camera that changes every month which is shot in either JPEG or RAW+JPEG to post up photos SOOC without any kind of Edits in POST.
I will also be using cameras that are newer purchases or trades and I haven't fully reviewed here yet. I'll "pretend" I don't have this huge library of lenses to go with these cameras and if the camera has interchangeable lenses, I will only have one lens attached for that "Daily Carry" I can just keep in the car assembled, grab and shoot.
For those who followed my 52 camera challenge in 2023 or my daily photos on my personal social medias this year; you would have noticed that almost all of the photos, yes even those taken with an absolute rubbish camera like the GE 1400, were doctored up in POST.
I was aiming to get the best photo I could get from the equipment I had at my disposal and it did teach me one thing: with today's Lightroom/Photoshop/Photo Editor of choice you can indeed polish a turd quite easily even if the camera does not support RAW (Raw just lets you do more with it and push further but these days yes you can polish a JPG from a digicam into something respectable with not much effort).
Looking back at a lot of my camera reviews a lot of the sample photos look very similar in quality with only subtile differences because whether it was a DSLR from 15 years ago or a Mirrorless body that's modern and still being made (or recently discontinued) I was putting this extra effort into making the photo look like what I thought it should look like after it was pulled off the camera. Adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, sharpening and of course the biggest sin: becoming super pixel peepy and removing as much noise as I possibly could.
As a dedicated hobbyist photographer I do not "take photos" in the same way as the "average person" does if the average person was armed with a dedicated camera and not just their Phone which makes all these crazy corrections to the photo for them automagically.
When shooting RAW I often try to go for as Neutral of a shot as I can. Have a nice flat curve, even exposure and not too vibrant of colors because I can just bump them up in POST. This mindset changes of course when you are either stuck with, or shoot by choice in JPEG.
Cellphones aren't the first to have offered "filters" and effects inside the device. Digital Cameras were. Some of these such as Fuji's "Film Simulation" modes are still quite popular for people seeking to just point, click and post.
Up to this point filters/creative modes/etc are something I've been fully ignoring because they are all "consumer features" normally. Part of the challenge will be using some of these filters and see what they can do.
So if you see me post up a black and white photo for example during this challenge; that wasn't me editing it in post but using a setting/profile in the camera that is adjusting the image as it is being shot and written to the memory card.
This is not to say I won't use my "best gear and edit photos" during the year at all; quite the contrary. I will still be shooting raw and slapping things around Lightroom when out doing more serious nature photography walks or at a Photography Club outing or event where I DO want to push my gear and get the best photos I can from it.
But I think it would be neat to take a few moments to take a step back and see what these cameras can do on their own without going overboard on editing just like the average person who takes photos for fun would do with it.
Is "Fuji Magic" actually a thing (because there IS a Fuji mirrorless camera in this challenge, I finally got one!) and does a $1400 modern Full Frame mirrorless camera with a $1000 lens actually take that more impressive of a photo without taking advantage of its much better Dynamic range in a POST editor then say a digicam I payed less then $20 for out of the box?
It will be interesting to find out. I will be doing a review at the end of the month of the camera I used coming purely from the perspective of the shooting experience and what the photos look like straight out of the camera.
During these reviews of the "daily carry" for the previous month I will be more critical on things that I normally would not care as much about such as "how good is the camera at Auto White Balance" which otherwise may not be a dealbreaker for me, but would be night and day for someone who just wants to upload and post the photos they took straight off the memory card which again, is the majority of people who go out and do casual photography.
The only editing I will allow myself is rotating and re-sizing the photo if necessary; since a 24mp image is quite large for posting on social media.
This "no edit in Post" otherwise rule also means I can't crop for these photos which is another reason I am still going to "Cheat" when it comes to my regular Wildlife photography as I know I'm not going to get a good photo of like a Bald Eagle without having my longest lens on and then cropping heavily in post so the subject better fills the frame instead of just being a little speck in the center.
Getting good photos for this challenge will rely soley on trying things with the camera itself and culling, IE there are going to be a lot of terrible photos from this experiment I'll likely just delete. You're only going to see the ones where the camera actually did its job and didn't fuck up :).
Here's a sneak peak from some SOOC images I took with my first challenge camera for 2025 this week. Which camera is it? Well you'll have to wait till the end of the month to find that one out.
No comments:
Post a Comment