What to do after the shutter is clicked

Nowadays doing extensive post-processing of a photograph is a given. The photo editor app is a necessary, indispensable part of the tool kit. It has not always been that way.

Those of us who did our picture making in the Kodachrome era had no choice. You did all your work before pressing the release. You decided on subject, poses, composition, angle of view, perspective, emphasis, lighting, filtration, and all the technical details. You put it all together and pushed the shutter button at the “decisive moment”. Once the shutter was released the work of the photographer was done. The rest happened in the commercial lab. Once the slides came back all you could do is show them or toss them.

Much of that ethos is still ingrained in my approach, but post-processing is now also part of my creative work and I plan for it, even depend on it.

In the past weeks I have been going through years of my street photography, selecting and reprocessing those old photos. You can see them, one a day, over at my Ludwig.Gallery. The click-and-it’s-done attitude is still very prevalent in the street photography community. Indeed, many of the photos in my new series are presented full frame without cropping. I do, however, see the original as just the “negavite” and process it to bring out how I experienced the situation and how I want to present it. The great landscape and fine art photographers would not do it any other way.

Allow me to illustrate some challenges with a couple of my photos. These two present interesting opportunities and challenges, they are outliers in that respect.

Straighten and crop?

This photo was taken with the camera badly tilted. I rarely do that except when I think it would yield an interesting effect. Looking at it now, years later, I don’t see any advantage in the tilt. What if I just did a bit of perspective correction and turned the whole picture?

I can’t see it hanging on a wall that way. How about a serious cropping?

This is more like I would want it now. And this is how it will go into the Ludwig.Gallery series.

Color or back-and-white?

Much street photography is done in black-and-white. The monotone image abstracts the scene and presents a mood that is very different. It is more contemplative, “narrower” in telling its story.

Here is a photo that right from the beginning I thought might be better in black-and-white. But there is more to black and white that just turning down the saturation. In classic photography the use of filters was a big part of creating the image.

Take a look at the two versions of this photo. Move the slider right and left to see two very different filtration effects.

Here it is in color.

Go back up and see how the left B&W image lightens blues and darkens reds, while the one on the right does the opposite – reds become light, and blues go dark. The emphasis can be placed clearly on the locomotive, or it can disappear into the background. Color can’t really do that. But color adds realism and pop.

There are other challenges, let’s keep them for another day.

.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck