When I started photography as an hobby about three years ago, I was strongly against post processing. I believed that a photo must be able to capture in it the moment and the ability of the photographer to use the camera. I even believed that making a photo better than the original was simply cheating.
This thought process boded well with me for two reasons:
1. It made me strive to be better at taking photos.
2. I hardly ever spent much time looking at photos and wondering how to make it look better(which does take time)
Over time I was more relaxed with what I allowed myself to do with photo. First, it was allowing myself to crop and rotate images, to take away distraction from unwanted parts of image. Then moving to making images “black and white” or “sepia” on the comp rather than at the moment. The latter was good move as it allowed me to capture the moment and not worry about switching modes on the spot.
More recently being inspired by a lot of my friends, I have been putting more and more photos under the knife. I have been playing around with sharpness, brightness, white balance and the works. The drive to make the person viewing the photo go ‘wow’ had slowly taken over my priorities. This was slowly but steadily killing the budding photographer in me.
I look back at some of the photos I have taken and clearly the moment was not as perfect as the photo. Somewhere along the way of making it look better, it had crossed the boundary of the natural. Oddly this is what I will eventually think I had seen when I revisit the photo years later.
The last set of images I had uploaded (Kuala Lumpur in the Night) did not contain a single post processed image. The fact that I simply selected the images and uploaded them gave me immense pleasure, I will be aiming for that in the future.
So from now on I have decided to completely avoid post processing of any photos I take. I will allow myself to crop parts of images and at max maybe a little sharpening but will not do any retouching just to make the photo look professional better.
There is a beautiful saying in the Gita, probably the most famous of its sayings. It goes(translated to hindi): “Karam kar par phal ki iccha mat kar“. Which means “Do something because you want to do it, not for the fruits its going to bear.”
The idea with which I picked up photography was that I could maintain a visual record of my life. That is why I write detailed travelogues, that is why i dont worry too much about watermarking my photos or if someone copies them. I truly appreciate the pats on the back I receive for some of my photos but I dont think its fair for me to lose the real idea behind my photos in a chase for those pats on the back.
Ps: I consider post processing as a beautiful and serious art. I want to, down the line sit down and learn to be better with improving the look and feel of images. Also, it makes more sense for my friends to work on their images as I know they are very remarkable photographers. For me, I think I will have to wait till that time comes :P