Sunday, February 19, 2006

Which File Extension Are You?

Sorry about the lack of updates. Been occupied with a lot of stuff that I won't bore you with just yet. There will be a post or two dedicated to the things I've been doing, so you'll just have to wait for that.

Now in the mean time, have a look at some of my pics. Why? Because one of my friends was under the impression that photography is all about point-and-click. If it was so simple, we'd have millions of ace photographers now wouldn't we? Sure cameras these days do almost everything for you, but to get creative shots you still have to go manual. Not only that, after you take the shot you often have to do quite a bit of processing to make the image 'pop'. Atleast that's the case in my camera (Kodak DX6490, no longer in production).

I thought I'd show you some before/after shots of mine - you can see how the original photo looked like when it came out of the cam (flat), and then how I made it 'pop' after tweaking it in my digital darkroom.



Now don't think that all my photos are post-processed, many come out just great out of the cam. Those I happily resize, add a border and upload to my gallery. Examples are '10:27pm', 'Red Light Experiment', 'Tiny Branch', 'Roll' and 'Upside Down', to name a few.

For those of you who skipped the above paragraphs because it was too boring, this is for you:

Take the Which File Extension Are You? quiz. It's quite fun (if you're absolutely bored). My extension is .jpg, which is pretty apt, no? This is the description I got -- "You are very colourful. Sometimes you forget things, or distort the truth. You like working with pictures more than words."

Which file extension are you?

7 comments:

Poornaa Venkatesan said...

Ahhh....
Now I know why they look soooo good.
:-P

Anonymous said...

Yeah...! ;) I usually don't modify my pthotos. In my opinion, retouching a phohto means cheating! :P

Anonymous said...

even with analog cameras one can retouch photos. there are tons of filters and lenses and other stuff for a slr camera. even on the darkroom, one can create shadows and do cropping and all the crazy stuff one can do with photoshop, you can pretty much do it in there too. the only difference is that the darkroom is in the computer, so its very easy. and very cheap too :-)

Varun Abhiram said...

Thank you all for the comments. Haven't seen you in a while Ismaele :)

Well, retouching a photo is NOT cheating. Lemme quote what a few photographers at bytephoto had to say about this (someone there was of a similar opinion) --

"I am a long time student of photography and have like most of my peers recognized the alteration of an image electronically as the natural evolution from darkroom manipulation thus the nickname it has garnered “Digital Darkroom”. Manipulation in the darkroom was a necessity to achieve a print in the early days of film photography and continues to this day. I think that the “Photoshopping” of most images should be recognized for what it usually is, the artists attempt to make the photo as true to the scene or to his or her creative idea as they can get it.

I continue to fall back on my belief that if any of the photographers that you revere from years gone by were working today they would be leading the way with Photoshop or other similar photo manipulation programs.

This is just my opinion but one that is echoed in multitude amongst today’s best photographers."



"what a crock of ..... for years Ive sat back and watched people with their own developing studios win photography contests while those who relied on straight from the camera shots developed by the local store rarely won, they manipulated as much as any photshopper did, you dont really think that Ansel just took his shots straight from the camera do you??? By the way, one can not make a bad photo into a good one, you still have to understand the camera, composition etc. I think Im not too bad at photoshop but give me a really badly composed out of focus shot and no matter how hard I try I cant make it a winner."

Anonymous said...

yes. what varun said. :-)

and i took the file extension test/quiz/dochism and turns out im a ogg... yay?

http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2004/10/file_extensions/ogg.jpg

-pablo

p.s - i wrote the 3rd comment.

Anonymous said...

I still think that the best photographer is the one who manages to make a good photo directly from the first shot(s), without retouching! :) Where's the photographer's ability, if he makes "crappy" photos, but can retouch them to have them look good? ;)

P.S.: My file extension is .HTML, according to that quiz! ;)

Varun Abhiram said...

Pablo -- .ogg huh... close enough, wouldn't ya say?

Ismaele -- .wad would have been better, but I guess they won't have that extension listed :)

Kartik -- Don't know if being tagged is a good thing because I don't know what a tag is. Off to your blog to find out...