Slideshow.

To Tweak Or Not To Tweak?

That really is the question!

When I started on the journey to make the "Masters of Wedding Photography" films back in 2004-2005 and again for the second in the series a couple of years later; I had probably been in a position that no other photographer on earth had been in before. I had had the opportunity to watch ten of the most skilled wedding photographers in the world shoot: from start to finished product.

That is to say, I watched them photograph their clients and then watched what happened to the images in post production. Not from all of the ten but of the few who used photoshop as a means of creating art from the images they had just captured.

The contrast in styles are very apparent in the images but it's the ethos of the photographers that really brings me to the question of this post, "To Tweak Or Not To Tweak".

The very thing that makes Yervant for example, shine, is the manipulation of his images until the final look is acquired. He himself has said this on countless occasions and has said to me personally that the post-production is a critical factor to his mind. "An image not manipulated is unfinished" to be precise.

A year before the making of Masters of Wedding Photography,

Martin Schembri told me, "I don't care how it's achieved as long as it is" when talking about an image of his own that to me, looked for all the world, like a rembrandt painting.

That brings me to the opposite side of this ethos and the work presented by "Photojournalists" like Denis Reggie, Jeff Ascough and George Weir all of which pronounce a preferred "non-manipulation" of their images in post production, yet most if not all, do in some way manipulate the images they produce: whether by conversions to black & white to various sepia tones etc.

So what is the thinking of those two camps?

I have mused on this over the years and I remember a well known wedding photographer saying to me that another photographer whose work we were discussing, "didn't' have the skills,(digital) to produce the kind of work produced by Yervant.

This Photographer himself was one firmly in the "non-manipulation" camp and the comment surprised me. Was this the same for those whose images are left virtually untouched?

Did they lack the skills? It's worth thinking about.

The conclusion I have come to over this question though is really by way of a question. Just what is manipulation of an image?

Before the age of digital capture and computer post-production we had film, and before colored film we had the choice of black and white or nothing at all. When color film became available photographers still shot black and white film by way of choice.

Now, in those days, professional photographers developed their work in dark rooms and the process included, how long an image should sit in developer and just when to pull that image and "fix it" along with dodging and burning and a multitude of other treatments. In short "manipulate".

So the question should really be, "To Tweak a Bit or Quite a Lot" or to produce images as closely as possible as the human eye has observed it. Even this approach though, would require a degree of manipulation.

I must admit at this stage that I have a preference for images that look natural and unposed and I love good black and white images above just about any other. The thing is though: those images are not natural and they are not what the eye sees. We as photographers make the choice wether to convert to black and white or to leave an image in color or we make the decision to load mono as apposed to color film.

Those choices are not just artistic ones. They are, in their own way, manipulations before the image has even been taken.

I have just shot a wedding that for some reason just didn't look that great to me with normal post-production work and so I started to mess around with color and textures.

Two of those images I have posted below. My choice was governed by my need to see the images the way I did in my mind when I shot them.

To me then the answer to this question is quite simple....."To Tweak Or Not To Tweak"?

If you think it needs it and the image will benefit as a result!

Or... as Martin Schembri put it, "I don't care how it's achieved as long as it is".