Month: October 2018

Adobe Lightroom, Floral Photography

Lightroom Woes

by patricia emerson mitchellLeave a Comment on Lightroom Woes

I don’t know if anyone else is having Adobe Lightroom woes at the moment, but I sure am. It is so incredibly slow I finally just give up after trying it for a while. Each action takes at least 10 seconds. Now I realize that seems like a small amount of time, but not when you are working on a photo and are doing a lot of work. Trust me. I’m not sure if it’s that I moved to Apple’s Mojave or what, but it is quite troubling, since I do pay a monthly fee for Adobe Lightroom and right now it’s pretty useless.

It is so frustrating, in fact that I am posting this image that took far too long to work on and giving it all up for today. Fortunately I have images saved that I can use for Goodnight Flowers for a while.

Purple, White, Yellow, Blue, 2.14.18

Floral Photography, Photography

I’m A Bug Killer

by patricia emerson mitchell6 Comments on I’m A Bug Killer

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.