Before you shoot

Before you shoot that picture! In the days of fi lm photography, we would often use a Polaroid™ as a way to test the lighting and show clients a preview of how the image would look. Photographers would often use the excuse that the quality of the Polaroid wasn’t up to standard and that it would look OK once they saw the fi lm (by which time it would be too late!). Now, in the age of digital photography, photographers are tempted to say ‘we’ll fi x it in Photoshop’. Of course, Photoshop can be used to fi x almost anything, but the trick to becoming a successful and productive photographer is to be able to work out when it is appropriate to use Photoshop and when it’s better to get this right ‘in-camera’ fi rst. For commissioned shoots this is something that should be worked out before you pick up the camera, or earlier still at the layout stage. It all boils down to making the best use of your time. In Figure 1.1 you can see how Martin easily added extra width to a studio-shot picture using the content-aware scaling feature. It took a matter of a few seconds to do this in Photoshop, whereas it would have required extra space (and expense) in the studio to add extra width to the shot. For example, most seamless background rolls are only nine feet wide and Martin would have had to rent a studio with a wide enough cove and have it painted by hand to get the full backdrop width in camera. Some people will call this cheating, while others will look at the economic necessities and conclude that using Photoshop in the post-production stage makes the most sense. These days a lot of movies and TV dramas are fi lmed on studio sets where many of the props and exterior details are missing and added in later. This kind of post-production work is so successfully done that you’ll hardly be aware of the artifi ce that’s involved.