Two Many Irons

Two Many Irons, originally uploaded by Uncommon Depth.

This is one of my personal favorites from the branding. When I am at art shows, people tend to ask about my use of Photoshop and assume all my images are heavily Photoshopped. I don't know what most people would deem heavily Photoshopped, but many of my images I don't consider heavily edited.

This particular has had more work than most, but all I did was use 2 of my hand painted textures as layers, a color adjustment, and a curves adjustment. Yesterday's image of the strawflower is just a texture layer. The majority of my adjustments are done in the raw conversion these days. Is that considered Photoshopping or not?

On the weekend I met another photographer whose work I instantly fell in love with. Jonathan Luckhurst. He said he uses a medium format camera and does his own printing. I asked about the softness of his images and he replied that this look is achieved while printing and the negatives are all very sharp and detailed.

So why the bias on the use of Photoshop? I've often said that many of my digital techniques are capable of being done with film. It's much easier for me, personally, to work with digital because I have a high sensitivity to all chemicals (and I don't have a suitable space for a darkroom), but I think one of these days I'm going to reproduce some of these images with film just to prove a point.