Square photos don’t usually draw viewers’ eyes. People tend to like off-centre compositions and negative space, which give their eyes something to engage with. But I like the square crop and centred composition of this photo from 2007. It illustrates my comments from the 2002 post about missing the freedom to crop and manipulate images. As I got into the swing of using the Nikon DSLR, I started to enjoy the freedom to crop and enhance my photos using Photoshop. It had been years since I processed photos in a darkroom, but the intention was still there.
You can see the original below. Going digital made it so much easier to make better photos out of near misses like this. Having the black cockatoo hanging centred in the top third of the frame is far better than the original composition. Of course, that’s just my preference. Plenty of photographers would prefer to keep the unbalanced look of the original, perhaps cropping off the blurred vegetation on the right, creating negative space on the left to enhance the sense of motion.
When I look back on the photos from 2007, I also see that I started shooting RAW files at this time. For any who don’t know, a RAW file is the unprocessed version of the photo. It retains all the information captured by the camera sensor, as opposed to jpg files which compress the data, thereby losing some of the original photo information.
After I went digital, I took a renewed interest in the technical side of photography. I wanted to learn how the cameras worked but the more you learn about how a digital image is captured and stored, the more you realise that it is essential to also learn about the software you use to process the image. Learning all that technical stuff will eventually lead you into shooting and processing RAW files because they give you more power over the final image than shooting jpg format.
I started on a steep learning curve in a field that was new to me. It is also one that is constantly changing, so I am always on the lookout for new knowledge, untried techniques or good tips to incorporate into my digital photography.
In 2007, I captured the photo below, which was very well received. However, it was taken on the work camera during working hours, so the City of Albany owns the copyright. I present it here with the City’s permission. When a work colleague saw this image, she insisted that we send it to The West Australian newspaper as a promotion for the beautiful natural environment of the south coast. They published it, and we used it for a few City publications. A few years later at the end of 2010, The West Australian published a retrospective of the first decade of the new century. The editors selected this photo as one of the wildlife photos of the decade. Nice endorsement, pity the image didn’t belong to me.
