There. I said wrote it.
Yes. I kill bugs. But not in the way you might have thought. I just remove them from flowers sometimes. I mean, they weren’t always on the flower, right? Sometimes I remove them before shooting: I just blow them off or shake the flower a bit. I did both those things with this iris and more bugs appeared! I could tell they would win the battle if I tried to do anything more. So I killed them off at home. In Lightroom.
Pretty pesky little things, don’t you think? And distracting. In instances like this the first thing I do when I work on on image is use the handy dandy spot remover tool.
Now some will argue I’m being dishonest. I’m lying. I’m no longer the admirable truth teller you thought I was. (Hm. Did you admire me for that? Forget about it!)
The truth (Hah! Funny me to use that word, yes?) is that photographers work on images. Yes, even in the “olden days” with film. We clean things up. We brighten this and darken that.
And sometimes we even remove bugs.
This isn’t my final image, but it shows you the difference between a buggy iris and a clean one. Me? I prefer the clean one.
There ARE times when one shouldn’t alter a photo at all of course: documentary photography — reporting on wars, images of, say, inaugurations — alterations of those (and more) should not be done. But they have been, and sometimes people have been fired for such things when they’ve been found out.
No one has fired me for my bug removal. Of course no one has hired me either.
you know they say if you remove a bug with photo edits – you remove it’s soul and then it dies. Those ants may have been sending you a message. We were here first, buzz off human. L well happy debugging!
Well, they weren’t ants … not sure what they were, though. I’d have to ask my niece, who studies insects. But I’m bigger. I win.
L yes, patricia vrs the tiny bugs. You definitely win that one. Have fun. Sometimes bugs add to your photo esp. little bees. 🙂
I have a good number of bee photos, actually: I love shooting them. I also have some of the “bad guys”: the bugs who demolish a flower. There’s one that can eat an entire rose on its own. And still it’s a small thing.
There are days when I have to chase a fly off the flower multiple times before I get the picture. Pretty Iris !
Thank you, John!
Sometimes I think these insects just want to be in pictures. 🙂