dale

I had a great time meeting Dale on the Next Step workshop in Savannah. She claims to have a problem with focus, either that or a real fondness for blur which she turns into a great virtue. Either way, the images Dale posted were all simply stunning. Most of the images I saw from Dale had been manipulated through Photoshop. She uses it to express her ideas in a way that I can never grasp with tools like that. The changes strengthened or even radically changed the images but made them beautiful and emotive. I've been working to remove Photoshop and editing tools from my workflow for several years now. I'm not against the idea, but I spent many years learning and working on digital imaging professionally and have developed an aversion to that kind of editing in my personal photography. I think also as I developed as a photographer I wanted to stop fixing my images, forcing myself to get it right in camera rather than trying to save results. I got increasingly tough on myself in editing, throwing shots away that I used to make work in Photoshop and I'm certain that bias has helped me grow as a photographer. But you can have too much of a good thing and maybe I need to start paying more attention to creative uses of post-processing in my photography and learning how to take my images to the next level, digitally. When I do, I'll thank Dale for that inspiration.