One of the advantages of a visit with Melinda is the inspiration I get from her to edit my photos. When I started my blog, I was so intent on mastering the technical aspects of photography——the exposure triangle: aperture, ISO, shutter speed; and of course focus——that I rarely made any edits to my photos, expecting shots straight out of the camera to be perfect. What I didn’t understand at the beginning was that photographers have always edited their photographs in some way. The act of developing a negative (or a digital raw file) requires edits in some form or other. I was very slow to pick up on that but over the years, and with Melinda’s encouragement, I have begun to edit my photos, sometimes discovering stunning beauty where I thought none existed. While I was in Arizona, Melinda and I visited Willow Lake at golden hour. I was disappointed by the light that evening and my shots seemed dull and lackluster. Then, I decided to see if editing would help. I turned up the “dehaze” filter (my new favorite Lightroom editing tool) and saw improvement immediately so I began to tweak other sliders.
Here are two shots from that evening, the first facing away from the setting sun and the second taken about 15 minutes later facing the setting sun. With these edits, they don’t seem dull and lackluster to me any longer.
So beautiful, Carol!!! I’m so glad to see you edit your photos (finally!)- what a difference a few sliders make! I’m envious of the backlog of magnificent photos you have on your hard drives that have never been edited- you have some rainy day fun ahead of you!
We visited Watson Lake in 2012, but did not experience a great evening sky. We really liked Prescott.