Sunday, February 23, 2014

Learning About Your Medium



            Okay when I say medium I am not talking about one of those people that tell you your future or speak with the dead but I am referring to the medium an artist decided to work in.  It’s important that any artist take the time to learn about the medium he or she decides to work in.  It’s all part of the self-teaching we each have to go through to master our craft.  For some of us that mean knowing what people have done before and how they got the results that they did.
            For me it started with photography.  I took book after book about photography out of the library so often the libraries knew me if not by name than by how I looked.  I scrounged around the Internet for blog and other tutorials information I could that would enlighten me more about how photographers got some of the awesome shots I see in magazines or online.  Occasionally they were just master of the post processing their images till it's look the way they wanted or the photographer just new how their equipment worked at the time.  It forced me to learn a lot more how to work with the equipment I had and made me learn how to process a photo correctly. 
            Because of my diving into photography and learning as much as I could about it I stopped just shooting in JPEG and in time stopped shooting in JPEG plus RAW.  Now just shoot in RAW.  Once upon a time I would shoot and not bother with post processing. Now I wouldn’t even think about posting an image without doing some post processing work on it.  Luckily Lightroom is a great program for photographers and not as hard to learn as Photoshop is.  I see myself getting to the point where I would need Photoshop for some of the images I want to do but for now Lightroom does majority of the things I need to do. 
            I expect there will be a great deal more for me to learn but so is whatever type of art one undertakes. 

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