Having explained in my previous post my renewed desire to pursue photography without the encumbrances of whining about my photography equipment, I set about pouring over the library of images that I have accumulated since cataloging my digital shooting with Adobe Lightroom with the intent of creating a portfolio of my current work.
I love Adobe Lightroom, which like Apple Aperture, have developed a digital workflow for photographers that is referred to as ‘non-destructive editing’. That means that your master images, downloaded from your digital camera or digital media, equivalent to your negatives or transparencies from film days, are not altered during editing and adjustments plus the programs have some powerful cataloging and sorting features. If you are a photographer and not familiar with these products, check them both out.
While I have worked with both programs and they are great products, I chose Adobe Lightroom because of its tight integration with exchanging files with Adobe Photoshop, a program I used almost daily in my graphic design work. Lightroom has some great tools for processing digital images but sometimes you need a pixel editor such as Photoshop to finish of an image.
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[/frame_left]So, using Lightroom’s cataloging features and sorting using the digital ‘light table’, I began selecting images that I thought would be a worthy addition to a beginning portfolio. This process was re-invigurating and began to let the passion that was emerging as the ‘desire of my heart’ begin to unfold.
All of the images that are contained in the Point & Shoot Portfolio (click image at left to view) are taken with point and shoot cameras. Digital cameras have come a long way since 1991 (Kodak DCS 100: first professional DSLR) and 1994 (Apple Quicktake 100: first consumer digital camera) and the quality & feature set of today’s point and shoot cameras is quite astounding given their size, small size sensors and less powerful processors. Most recently I have been shooting with the Canon PowerShot G11, a 10 MP camera with better than average noise and a greater degree of manual & direct control than most similar cameras. I hope you will agree that the images in this portfolio represent some above average work using a point and shoot camera.