brian's photowezk

A lot of purist 'condemn' the use of Photoshop or whatever form of digital manipulation on images. Most of the time, these purist have failed to realize that back in the film days, the same kind of manipulations have been in practice. The final photo usually has a certain degree of post processing (through chemical reaction) during developing.

Times have changed and therefore, the way photos are process goes from analog to digital as well.

Digital processing is the same as developing negatives (analog). In fact, a lot of tools in photoshop or any image processing software derive from the olden ways of developing photos. Therefore, it is quite unfair to call post processed pictures a 'artifical'. Unless of course, objects are explicitly added or a scene is articially constructed via digital means.

Below is a shot which has been heavily post-processed in Photoshop.

Most people complaint about noise grain when shooting at high ISO. Indeed, noise grain is one of the major problems with high ISO even for DSLR. For compact cameras, one can hardly go beyond ISO200 for a reasonable noise level. Therefore most of us will shunt away from high ISO shooting. But on the flip side, at very low light condition, motion blur kicks in resulting in blurry/unsharp pictures.

During my Taiwan trip, I shoot mostly at ISO500 or above. Even in broad daylight. Reason being, it was cloudy. Throughout my 9 days in Taiwan, the sun was out in full blast only for 2 days. With the sun behind the clouds, considerable amount of light was lost. So in order for me to 'regain' back those light, I had to shoot at ISO500. I was skeptical to shoot at high ISO for, like everybody else, worried about the noise grain which means that I would have to do a lot of post processing later on.



But well, it turns out that the pictures turn out to be pretty clean. In fact, for most of my pictures that were being shot at below ISO1000, I hardly have do noise clean up in photoshop. The end result of high ISO shooting in day light - sharper pictures. I did not have to scarifice my shutter speed for moving objects and so, this means a properly exposed scene (aid by high ISO) and fast shutter speed to 'freeze' moving objects.