"I'll Fix It In Post"

I thought I'd use this blog post to talk about locations, and how they can sometimes cause shoots to be harder work. In the studio you have a controlled environment. You decide on the background, the lights, the modifiers, etc. However, once you leave the studio anything can happen. You are at the mercy of the environment and just have to control it as best you can. To some photographers, the statement "I'll fix it in post" is blasphemous. But sometimes a shoot would be a complete wash out otherwise. This weekend I went out with Midknight Dragon to shoot Pipa Wolf Cosplay. I was aware what location shots she had done with the particular character already, so found a location that would offer something a bit different, but still be correct. According to an app on my phone, the weather was likely to be light rain. But Pipa had already confirmed that she was happy shooting in those conditions, and I had made preparations so my gear wouldn't get damaged. As we got closer and closer to the location, it became clear that the environment wasn't going to be as I had anticipated when making my plans. For a start, there was quite a bit of snow. But the main problem so far as photography was concerned was the fact that we were at the top of a hill, and the cloud cover was at ground level! This next image illustrates what I was capturing in camera.

But by using Lightroom, it was a simple enough job to clear up the image.

The cloud cover meant that we lost out on the long sweeping vistas I had been planning to shoot. But by just doing a slight edit in Lightroom, the shoot wasn't a complete right off and I really like quite a few of the images captured.

If I wasn't spending time editing and "fixing" images in Lightroom after a shoot, then this would have been a completely ruined shoot. I know this is an extreme example, and I totally agree that it is very important to get everything right in-camera. But sometimes that just isn't possible. Lightroom (and Photoshop) are tools to help us. So remember that if you see a photograph on the back of my camera, that usually isn't the finished image!