Tag: bugs

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.