Editing is such an important part of photography. Albeit not always the most exciting part but it has to get done and can be a lot of fun too. Things have come along way since my humble beginnings in photography. In the pre-digital days you had to go out and shoot film, take it to the lab to get developed and get your prints done. You could use different film stocks to get different results. If you had access to a darkroom you could work some magic there with cropping, print times, dodging and burning while making your prints and how long you developed the prints etc. etc.. If you were shooting with colour you could tweak the colour balance (that is something that always challenged me). There was always cross processing that could give you some really cool images as well… That was back before digital cameras came, before Adobe Photoshop, before scanners. That changed everything.
There are so many programs and apps out there to edit your photos. The camera on your phone is 1000x better than the early digital cameras that came out. You can edit your photos on your cameras and share them with the world in mere seconds. All unfathomable when I first got into photography. It’s almost overwhelming!
My advice for you is find something, anything that you are comfortable with and make it work for you. Don’t worry too much about what camera you have or what program you use to edit your photos. Find a system that you can work with. Take care when you take your pictures. Work on your composition. Learn how to expose your photos. Work the gear that you have. Your photography will get better, it takes time. Best of all keep it fun or make it fun again.
These shots are from 2006. I was using my mom’s Sony DSC-W1 camera. It was a little brick that took great little shots for that time. It was the first digital camera that I used and I took it all over the place as it was small enough to fit in my pocket. I must have taken thousands of photos on that thing. Most of them weren’t very good but it let me figure out how the camera worked. My framing of shots got better and it did not cost me hundreds of dollars getting film developed. This was big for me and shaped how I work today.
The black and white edit is current. The colour edit is from when the picture was first shot on a very early version of Adobe Lightroom and then I have included the original photo straight from the camera for a comparison.
Higgerty’s Shoes was at the corner of Frank and Bank Street here in Ottawa. I used to live just down the street and would walk by this corner daily and always loved the typography of the sign. I am happy I took this photo when I did. The store is long gone and is now a very cool restaurant; Fauna. This is a document of Ottawa history.
Take care out there.
Jeremy
Dusty Negatives 