Compare and contrast
Posted by Andrew
I went to the beach with some of my classmates and last week’s speaker on Friday, and as always, I took my camera along. The sunset was gorgeous, and I took a few shots.
Those of you who follow my flickr stream will have noticed that a couple of those shots have already gone up, most notably the two featured in this post. I’m interested in what people think of both of them, because I’m not quite sure how I feel about them.
Originally, I just posted the image below, which is as untouched as most of my images come — straight from the camera (with auto white-balance, because I’m lazy) to Aperture (my photo-management software) and then straight to Flickr, through the handy dandy export plugin. I was pretty happy with the shot, but I wondered if I could do something with it in Aperture, because I didn’t feel like it really conveyed how things looked.
The results of a bit of twiddling in Aperture can be seen below. It’s pretty drastic, and really makes the whole scene a lot more dramatic. In all honesty, the actual image is probably between these two images, but of course, that is all in my memory. All I did in Aperture was mess a little with the contrast, push the blacks up a bit and compress the mid-tones a little, as well as pulling out the reds and darkening the blues.
My issue is, my photo now no longer represents either what I directly captured, or the original scene. Really, most people would be none the wiser, had I not posted both versions or written this post, but it raises an interesting question in my head.
What do you think? Knowing what you know, which image do you like more? Which is more genuine? Does it matter? Is my manipulation deceitful? Should I spend more time processing my photos to make them more dramatic?
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