Christina-Clare Photography | Bridgnorth Portrait Photographer

Do you know what 'SOOC' means? I didn't. And after a quick Googling found that it was an abbreviation for 'Straight Out Of Camera'. No cropping. No edits. No alterations. As intimidating and exciting as a brief could be.

Being forced to work without post production was both a curse and a blessing. We live in a world where every camera, phone, app offers some sort of post-processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to differentiate between good photography and good editing and we are completely acclimatised to 'perfected' images, that often when we see images without it, we mistake them for bad images. So it was quite a task to make something that would hold it's own without brightening a little here, or cropping a little there. This week meant I had to work so much harder in pre-production, had to work like I did when I worked in film, I had to plan the shot, the light, the angle and crop to make something worthy of my portfolio, the exposure had to be perfect, the model had to be willing (or married to me and lacking in choice about the whole thing).

But the experience taught me so much about my approach to photography, about how my reliance on post-production actually can be a hindrance, making me work for so much longer to achieve something that could have been done in-camera, for example, I hadn't noticed the sand on his coat until I got the shot into my computer, something that's easily removed in post but if had to be done to multiple images would be far more time consuming than it would have been to just go over and brush it off before I started shooting. It made me realise that sometimes it pays to pay more attention to detail before rather than after, and it also made me appreciate that I don't NEED software as much as I thought I did, that sometimes I use it just because I can, when the same effect can be produced without it, with just a little more thought and providing much more consistency.

Christina-Clare Photography | Bridgnorth Portrait Photographer

Christina-Clare Photography | Bridgnorth Portrait Photographer Christina-Clare Photography | Bridgnorth Portrait Photographer

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