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"Aaah, there's certainly some Photoshopping in this picture, right?" - if I got a penny every time I heard that...

Image manipulation. What a dirty little word. For many people this word implies fraud and deceit. It implies that the photographer isn't saying the truth with their photography. That they lie to the viewer by making something out of a picture that wasn't there. In many people's eyes it also means that nowadays you don't have to take good pictures anymore. Photoshop will fix it for you. Right?

They couldn't be more wrong. Or as my friend Robin Preston, a great illustrator and photographer, usually puts it: You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Let me get on my soapbox and then together let's have a quick look at the different techniques that are used every day in order to "manipulate" photography.

1. RAW conversion. Most serious photographers use the RAW format these days. It has more dynamic range, and it allows for much more subtlety during post processing. A RAW file is like a negative. You have to develop or convert it. And this conversion process is the point in the workflow where the photographer can and should make decisions on things like white balance, contrasts, saturation. A first step in the manipulation of images. "But I only shoot JPG, so my pictures are untainted!" Well, not quite. At the point where you look at the JPG on your memory card, your camera has already made a whole big bunch of decisions for you. It has determined the white balance, it has played with the contrasts and color saturation, it has sharpened the image and compared to the RAW file, your camera has thrown away about 90% of the image data in order to compress it to a smaller size.

In short: relying on JPG, or rather on your camera to do the post processing for you is synonymous to handing off the image development decisions to someone else, in this case the computer that's built into your camera. Not unlikely to what usually happened to the films that you handed off to the corner drug store for development.

Did analog photographers do this? Hell yeah! Developing film, enlarging the image, choosing chemicals, temperatures, durations, types of film, types of paper, ... that all had an influence on how the images came out.

2. Straightening. Yes, I'm guilty of straightening at least one out of ten of my images during post processing. It just happens that I don't hold the camera exactly straight sometimes. It has become better since I've started using a grid screen in my camera's viewfinder, but I still don't always get it right. Why do I straighten? Because I don't like that horizontal line of a building right next to the left side of the frame of my image to be one degree off and shout at the viewer "HEY! LOOK! The photographer had a little accident here!". Skewed water surfaces are even more prone to cause some level of discomfort with the viewer. Even half a degree off and the image will start waving a little red flag. And I usually want my viewers to feel comfortable when they look at my photography.

Did analog photographers straighten images? You better believe it! It's one of the easiest things to do actually. Just slightly rotate the photo paper before you expose it.

3. Contrasts. If you've ever shot in the RAW format, you will know that these images have the tendency to look more flat and less contrasty than JPG images. This is on purpose. In the RAW mode, the camera will produce images that are specifically made to be post processed. And this includes the contrasts. Contrast is extremely important. Photography is not an absolute art but has a lot to do with how contrasts relate to each other. So managing the contrasts in your image becomes an integral part of the process.

Did analog photographers manage contrasts? You betcha! Ansel Adams' Zone System is all about contrast management. Choice of film, paper, chemicals, temperatures, durations, ... all of that will influence contrasts.

4. Brightness distribution. Brightening parts of an image and darkening others? Bring out your pitchforks!! Or.. wait. Back in the analog darkroom we did the same thing. Burn and dodge. During the exposure of the photo paper that usually took several seconds to minutes, we would allow for more light to fall on those areas that we wanted to darken down (it's a negative process) and we would temporarily block light from those areas of the picture that we wanted to brighten up. Ansel Adams did a lot of that too. In fact most of the time that he spent taking (or making?) a picture was in the darkroom, managing brightness/darkness distribution (let's call that contrasts) making use of his Zone System.

5. Local contrast enhancements. If you apply a large radius unsharp mask filter (USM) to your image, you will effectively increase the local contrast. Smaller structures will appear more contrasty. You have control over this by varying the radius and amount you set for your unsharp mask. Now this MUST be cheating! Right?

Well, not exactly. At least there is nothing specifically digital about it. It's a technique which again derives from the analog world. It has been used to enhance contrasts and perceived image sharpness long before we had computers with Photoshop.

So what's the verdict? Are digital photographers cheaters? Is it wrong to adjust an image digitally? Let me hear your opinion in the comments!

We're going back to the Himalayas next spring. To be precise, we are going to see Kathmandu, Lhasa, the north side Everest Base Camp, and the east side of Mt. Everest.

We are not doing this alone, we will take a group of 15 photographers. The last trek has been an unforgettable adventure for me. This was my first time in Asia and I have returned with an enormous amount of new impressions and pictures. And I can't wait for the next trek to start!

I also wish I had taken the picture in this post. Well, I haven't, she has. You can't have everything, can you?

Let's analyze it.

For me this is a great example of a glimpse into the every-day life of a different culture. My eyes first get drawn in to the brighter areas of the picture, and to the places where contrasts are. I then start to explore and take in the scene and the meaning of what I'm seeing. A woman bending down, apparently busy washing something. Took me a few seconds to realize that she's actually washing a carpet. With a bowl of water. On the ground.

And all of a sudden there is this colorful story that starts to emerge in my mind. Why is she washing a carpet? Doesn't she have a vacuum cleaner? Most likely not. Vacuum cleaners are expensive where she lives. Electricity is either sparse or at least not reliable at all. Can't she put the carpet into her washing machine? Oh wait, same issues.

At the same time these thoughts are going through my mind, I keep exploring the image, I notice the beautiful reflections in the foreground, I realize that the ground behind the carpet is dry, so it wasn't rain that got the ground wet, it all comes from the carpet cleaning. Does she do that every week? Every month? Is the carpet something of value for them and is that why she carefully cleans it? Or was it just necessary because it had become too dirty?

And then there are the very formal image criteria. Subject? Check. (The woman). Placement? Off center. Leaves space for the great reflections. And gives the lines in the pavement the function to lead your eyes back up to the subject. Foreground/background separation? Works nicely.

Have you ever washed a carpet? How do you go about analyzing images? Do you spend time to think about them? Let us know in the comments!

On the weekend, Monika and I shot a wedding. We usually don't do that for clients, but this one was different, as friends of ours got married. But what does it take to shoot a wedding? I actually get that question a lot. Most of the time the question comes in an email and it is phrased more like "What equipment do you recommend for shooting a wedding?"

[insert sound of alarm bell here] Wrong question. Entirely wrong question. If someone cooks a great meal for you, you don't compliment them on their pots and pans, now, do you? You don't need to know what word processing software (or what notepad and pen) your favorite authors use to write their books. You don't ask a painter what brushes they create their art with.

You enjoy the meal, the book, the painting for what it is.

Why is that so different in photography? "Wow, that's a big camera. You must take great pictures with it" is actually an insult. It de-values our creative side.

But don't worry, you're not alone, and if you are new to photography, it's very easy to fall for what the industry tells us. Which basically is this: Buy new gear from us and your pictures will be so much better.

Wrong, industry. Dead wrong! Some of the best pictures I've seen have been taken with (by today's standards) inferior equipment. A picture is maybe (if at all) 10 percent about the technical quality, about the image sharpness, about the lack of chromatic aberrations, about resolution and about the number of megapixels. 90 percent of the image is YOU. It's your eye, your sense of composition, your sense of placing things in the frame so they play with each other in a way that helps you bring out that image you had in your head before you pressed the shutter button. It's about timing too, actually one could argue that it might even be mostly about timing. Even in landscape photography, where the clouds have that tendency to not wait in that beautiful spot until you're finished setting everything up for the picture.

So I'm not blaming you for asking the equipment question. I'm blaming the industry. Heck, even I have fallen for it, buying things that I didn't need and that didn't benefit my photography at all. I'm just glad I haven't spent $150 on a white balance device yet. And probably never will. The good old grey card ($5.95), a sheet of white paper ($0.01), or even the good old Pringles lid (unfortunately they stopped making the opaque ones, but some yoghurt lids will do the trick too) are all it takes. Everything else is Voodoo unless you get paid big $$$ for a job and need to impress your customer, or unless you really need 100% color accuracy in product photography, for print, or in high profile fashion stuff. I don't need that accuracy. Our eyes aren't scientific measurement devices. They are much more easily influenced by the light conditions surrounding us, which is why you should try to edit your images in consistent surrounding light conditions, but I digress.

How did I get here? Oh, I know, we talked about how the industry makes us buy more and more stuff, and how we forget that photography is actually about learning to see, about anticipating how the viewer will look at our picture, what will make them explore our photograph in which way and how we can guide their eye to what we deem important in a picture.

Photography is about telling stories. Stories that have arches, tensions, reliefs, and in the end it's about one of the most basic things: it's about evoking emotion! If I look a picture and it moves me in one way or the other, I couldn't care less about the technical side of things.

When was the last time you've bought something for your photography that didn't help you at all? Let us know in the comments what that was.

No, it's not easy to make a first blog post into something interesting. Not that I think it has to be. It's mainly a post to test all the integrations and here we truly have a HUGE amount of stuff going on behind the scenes.

First there is a blog over at Blogger, Google's blogging service. This is the source that keeps the blog posts and where I edit the posts. How do they end up here? The key is integration. Loghound is a small company who writes awesome RapidWeaver plugins. Oh, I have to explain first that this website is made using RapidWeaver, a website development system. Pretty nifty, and I like it a lot. Anyway, back to Loghound, so they made this little plugin called Rapidblog and this in turn allows me to seamlessly integrate a Blogger blog here on the site. There's a huge advantage doing it this way: I get all the convenience from Blogger (such as posting via e-mail, editing it via Marsedit, which I'm in fact doing right now) and the seamless integration into my personal web site.

Admittedly, I make myself dependent on Blogger, but a) the service has been around for a long time and Google isn't about to go away any time soon and b) if my personal web server goes down or gets hacked (which is more likely than Google's service going down) then I have a fallback, because I could simply send you over to the original Blogger blog, which doesn't look nearly as cool, but which does the trick.

But we're not finished yet with the integrating. Did I mention that I *LOVE* social media? Instead of using the Blogger commenting system, Rapidblog allows me to integrate with the Disqus commenting system which totally embraces the Web 2.0 social way of doing things. Post about this blog post on Twitter, Wordpress.com or many other sites and these comments will automatically show up as comments here. Speak of a great integration. And all that with setting up a couple of accounts and a few mouse clicks to integrate things. That's the way a-ha a-ha I like it...

Let me know what you think about all this. Scary? Way cool? Leave a comment!