Skip to main content

I did a dance shoot on Friday

Check out this edit I did. The more colorful one is the "after." It's more colorful than what it was like to really be there -- but the less colorful one also isn't what it looked like to really be there. It was so dim!


This kind of choice feels salient during photography post-processing. Should I make it look like how it looked to be there? Or how it FELT to be there? Or should I just do something cool?

The ideal probably depends on the purpose of the shoot. (Is it to remember a wonderful event? Is it to create a piece of art? Is it to give people photos to use for dating apps?)

in reply to kip

kip
kip
•

(I don't really like the photo I just shared -- it's just the most recent one I had up, & I'm testing all the features rn)

(I prefer the next photo in the set)

in reply to kip

Ben Weinstein-Raun
Ben Weinstein-Raun
•
I kind of wish photos came with "layers" you could peel back, like "here's the eye catching layer, that I built on top of the what-it-felt-like layer, which is on top of my camera's settings that day, which is on top of the raw sensor activations".
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

kip
kip
•

Yeah that would be nice! Partly because it sounds nice to give people a better idea of what goes into a pretty photo -- a lot of the labor is invisible. (Sometimes people just tell me "wow you have a really good camera" when they see my photos.)

But also because there's a big difference between what is optimal for aesthetics and what is optimal for accurate-information-sharing, and I'm disappointed about how much art distorts people's beliefs

⇧