Making a Wow Photograph

Image straight from camera



Photoshop layers
showing what it
took to optimize
the image.


Sometimes people ask me, "Well, aren't you shooting digital?" Within that simple interrogative comes an assumption that I just snap and print. Yes, that's possible. But I'm interested in making my photographs sing. When I'm finished creating an image, the reaction I'm hoping for is "Wow, that's a great photo."

So I just wanted show the work that goes into the making of a single photograph. The screen shot shows the Photoshop layers that went into creating the above simple photograph. And just to give you a sense of scale, most of my digital capture images end up being about 450-500 MB, with some exceeding 2 GB.