My photostream on Flickr has become a bit of a mess of highly post-processed images in the last week. It’s just a temporary phase, playing around with channel mixing in CMYK mode, and applying my grain filter to images that otherwise weren’t sharp enough or interesting enough to upload from Hawaii and elsewhere.
In general I’m not a big fan of such processing – I like photos to look real and believable, to put the viewer in that place, to feel what I felt as a photographer both physically and emotionally … the icy winds blowing off snowfields, the cheery warm glow of a sunset on a tropical island or the gloominess of a ghost town.
Over-processing tends to make scenes look alien or fake and can disconnect the viewer. That’s contrary to what I want to achieve with my photos so I’m usually quite subtle in my processing and very light touch with HDR. Of course that means that I very rarely get a photo featured on Explore but I can live with that.
