The Photo Boom!

Digital cameras have really caused some explosive growth in photography. Have you been to a concert or show recently? Heck, have you walked down the street of any town recently? Everyone's got a camera.. from 2nd graders to grandmas! :) I think that's awesome... especially with the fusion of the internet and photography, we've all been exposed to a lot of amazing talent and photographs. 10 years ago, I would think that most people's exposure to professional-level photography was from hard-copy magazines. Nowadays, a simple mouse click and we all have access to any number of quality photos from many different sources - magazine websites, new outlets, photography archives and even photo-blogs.

Recently, my good friend Ganendran Kumaraswamy won 4 categories in his office photography competition. He had some great shots which (as he loves to throw in my face) he made using a Canon point & shoot. Here's one of his winning entries:


(c) 2006 G. Kumaraswamy

My other buddy Deshan Tennekoon has a photo-blog where he posts shots that constantly enrapture me.
This just goes to show that digital photography has really taken off and I totally attribute it to digital's ability to produce results immediately. Film photography was more exclusive, and to get into it, you needed to have a little more patience as you had to wait a few days for processing hoping you caught something good.

Other than that, I bought a great book on Photoshop techniques called 'Photoshop CS2' by Scott Kelby. Now, I dislike doing major photo manipulation. And we could argue all day about this but I won't - I'll just say that I prefer never to remove objects from a scene, airbrush etc. To me the art of photography involves making or taking a photography with the light and objects availble. If an object is in the scene that shouldn't be there, then change the angle! If the skin looks a little off, then change the lighting! That said, there are some techniques that have to be used with digital photography which can't be avoided. This is to compensate for the intrinsic deficiencies of a digital sensor. Colour casts, lack of sharpness (depending on the sensor), brightness, contrast are all affected by the attributes of a digital camera sensor and have to usually (but not necessarily) be tweaked. Anyway, my point is this book really showed me how to tweak my photos to maximise quality and efficiency. I'm quite happy with my digital workflow (the way someone processes their photos - from copying out of a camera all the way to printing/publishing it on the web) now, I can go through a lot of photos much faster than I used to.

Here's a sample shot I took last weekend using the B&W post-processing technique described in the book - it produced a high contrast black & white shot which I really prefer to my usual method of producing black & whites.

(c) 2006 Sasi Shanmugarajah
Gernstein Library, University of Toronto

That's it for now, have a happy New Year to all my Sri Lankan friends and family, and an Easter for the rest of y'all :)