Where Everybody's Crazy

As you can probably tell, I'm going through a bit of a phase of being into photography. I'm sure it'll pass in a few months or so, but at the moment I'm getting as many pictures of things as I can. However, it does mean that I can lay claim to the stupidest statement of the year.

The stupidest statement I have made so far this year has been: "I don't really need to pay attention to that bit about how to make sure your snow scenes don't come out looking grey, because I'm hardly likely to be taking lots of photos of snow."

Snow photography and night photography - I'm just trying to give myself a hard time.

Before I went on the photography course, I was very much of the opinion that I shouldn't mess with the photograph before putting it on the web or whatever. What the camera saw, the viewer should see. Yeah, right.

Film photographers know that coloured filters, if used appropriately, can make a world of difference to a photograph; they know that there are things you can do in development and printing to pull up the brightness or sharpen things up or correct slight problems with the exposure. They know perfectly well that what the camera saw is not what the photographer saw, because the photographer's eyes adapt better than the lens. So Photoshop-fiddling with images is hardly new.

Which is why I'm rather happy with the photo above. It took a lot of messing about to make it look like that: partial desaturation, filters, brightness and contrast tweaks. But it looks like what I saw, more or less. In retrospect, I should have used spot metering or something to tell the camera that the majority of the light I see is reflected off the snow, not from the sodium lights of London in the horizon.

But then, you can always take a better photograph.