Tonight, I went to a softball game that Anna was playing in (law school thing). It started at 9, and I decided to take my camera for the heck of it. Even though I don't have a lense that will open up past f/3.5 it was still fun to mess around and see if I could get any shots. Of course, hand held shooting of sports at night is pretty difficult and needless to say I didn't really have the gear for it, but I still got one or two shots that I thought were ok. So as I sat here post proccessing the images (a process some liken to regular darkroom developing) two distinct trains of thought whizzed by.
The first (and honestly I had thought about this on another occassion as well), it is easy to see why Matt did not keep his digital camera. The whole digital workflow is something I can see him hating, especially given the fact that he is pretty good at the whole darkroom thing in real life. And the fact that you have to do something to nearly every picture can get annoying (even if you have something exposed correctly, you often still need to sharpen and saturate).
The second train of thought was reflecting on personal evolution. The whole digital darkroom process seems to be something you get better at with practice. The more I do it, the more I realize I can really turn snapshots into pictures. My latest addition is the 'Curves' adjustment. It is hands down the best color correction tool in Photoshop, but up to a few days ago, I had not bothered to put it to use. (Granted, this whole color correction thing is an artifact of going digital in the first place) I find myself torn, wanting to go back to even my most recent shots (the family picnic) and recorrecting the color and throwing in some other tricks I've recently learned, but I came to a decision. I will not be going back on what I've done enmasse and improving upon it. When I open up a digital negative to print it, I may at that time fix things up a bit, but for the most part, I'm going to leave what I've already done in the past. I guess the idea is that I can learn from what I did, and maybe even see my growth in photo development the same way my growth in photo composition is naturally changing.
I think Anna and I are going to go see Corpse Bride tomorrow night. I am pretty excited about that :-)