Every photographer knows that “Dang, I wish I had shot that image!” feeling when you spot a fantastic photo. I felt that this morning after viewing David Herreman’s “Castle of Miranda” image set on Flickr. The images have been heavily post-processed to produce a vibrant and moody feeling. This style of processing is very popular right now (a la Dave Hill’s photography), but David’s choice of subject further draws me in. Look at that texture and decay! Fantastic!
As I was just searching for Dave Hill’s name (I knew his work and style, just couldn’t remember his name), I came across an “image challenge” posted in the DPReview’s forums. The challenge was to take the original photo (below) and retouch it to mimic Dave Hill’s style. Most of the resulting entries were amateur filter-happy images, but one of them was perfect.
It gives me goosebumps flipping back and forth between them. The goosebumps come from thinking about the possibilities of actually retouching my own photographs. Most of the time I don’t do much to my photos beyond basic exposure, contrast, and color adjustments. I largely leave Photoshop out of the equation, which is ironic considering that I outgrew what my professor’s could teach me about the application when I was at RIT. In other words, I don’t use the program which I have long since mastered that was created solely for the purpose of image manipulation and retouching. Ironic. I think the time has come that I explore that avenue though. Very little successful photography, commercial or not, is left untouched these days (save for a few darkroom purists still lingering).