This is the picture that I wanted to get, and the image is ‘straight out of camera’ — I resisted any temptation to edit it beyond adding metadata — the high contrast and deep shadows were part of my plan.

I had a point to prove to myself. A website like this needs a bit of tending, it has over one thousand posts spanning many years. In that time screen resolutions and camera resolutions have changed, so there’s a constant round of maintenance, updating, correcting, and tidying up. Just recently I’ve been looking at how everything is organized, and in the process of reviewing the content I was surprised to discover how many of my favorite pictures came from my little FujiFilm Finepix F30 point and shoot camera. I realized — not for the first time — that I’ve grown lazy over time, and that I tend to rush my pictures, knowing full well that apart from some major disaster — and those do happen — I can re-frame and fix things in post production. So I decided to challenge myself to take this picture with zero editing.

I used the camera’s settings to get what I wanted. for the color version of this image I could have re-processed it in-camera as there is some handy software that lets me do that, but being lazy (or wanting to save time), I just added my film simulation of choice (Astia Soft), and sharpened the raw image in Lightroom.

So I can do it. Maybe I need to drag out the Finepix F30 and see what results I can get with that.   

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