The Road to the Future – or – ‘Do you use Filters’ Part 2

 The Road to the Future – or – Do you use Filters – Part 2

I originally wrote this  in answer to the most-received question ‘Do you use filters’ on my landscape photos – all about having a go at photography filters explained.

I am lucky enough to own a semi-professional Canon SLR. People sometimes call it a Big Camera. It’s certainly heavy and you know you are using it when you carry it. It takes wonderful images and they are large so they print beautifully without seeing any pixels. The funny thing is the way it actually takes pictures. They come out very basic, flat and colourless. I’ll explain – bear with me …

When you buy a stereo system for your home or for your car, you can spend hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands if you want. Generally what you get when you buy a really high end system is clear, crisp, 100% accurate sound. Ideal for playing orchestral recordings. If you play rap or hip-hop, it will sound good, but the neighbours won’t be bombarded by bass. If you buy a cheap system, you may very well end up hearing only bass, which is what a lot of people want. Cheaper systems are evolving all the time, and ‘colour’ the music a lot more than high-end systems.

Cameras? Well, oddly enough, if you buy high-end you get ‘natural’ photos, and ah-hem, if you buy at the other end of spectrum – let’s call it a recent iPhone – you basically get an ‘explosion in a paint factory’. A lot of people when they show me their photos insist ‘it looked just like that when I was there’ and they show me an iPhone 6/7/8/X image which quite frankly looks like Aunt Martha’s old big boxed TV with the colour guns all set (or broken) to 11 on an 10 scale.

To add to the confusion, I do my landscape photography in RAW format, which is like a digital negative and is designed to ‘need work’.

So – I hear you asking – ‘your point’? Well, once again we are in the hands of the tech companies. They, not us, will dictate the way our images look in 5, 10, 50 years’ time. Even more so than up to this point.
And once again I hear – do you use filters, do you use Photoshop?

Yes!!! but to get my images almost, but not quite, to the levels of new phones and up-to-the-minute Instagram filters.

Thanks for reading this far. A different take on ‘photography filters explained’. I hope it made you think.

Andrew Barnes
The Berowra Photographer

In the featured image – indeed – hardly any processing used!