Snap

Taking photographs is Hitomi's Forté and she is pretty good with a camera in her hands. She's always had an interest in that side of the lens. In the beginning she learned by asking questions of those who looked at her through the lens so she's had professional guidance long before she chose to take the courses and follow this path. She's always taking photographs as well as running her own studio now.
Personally I can say that I'm glad that she has found such a stable vocation. I recall vividly when she was an aspiring actress and she'd be away on tour and I'd endure weeks of comparative loneliness. Thankfully those days are gone. She is still on the books at the agency and still has an occasional assignment but more and more it's her business now that occupies her time. Whether it's a family looking for a portrait or a company looking for an advertising campaign or some model beauty shots then she's there hoping for business.
I am used to taking snapshots on my phone camera and I used to carry a 'fujifilm finepix exr' as my choice to capture my happy snaps. Until that one fateful day that I dropped it and I broke it, clumsy person that I am!

Hitomi often works with her Nikon D800 but her camera of choice is the Canon EOS 60D, she will always have this with her in her bag. It's a very nice and extremely lightweight camera of course but it is not the camera alone that creates such wonderful images no matter how expensive and technically brilliant it is, it's the artist operating it! In these days of digital photography it's important and perhaps necessary to have post photo management too. I know I've told you about us having Photoshop which we can use on images. I use it all the time for instance on some simple editing of things that I want highlighted, changed, removed or even inserted into images, especially ones that I publish here but Photoshop is a pixel editor and what a photographer needs is a dedicated photograph editor. The Canon already comes with DDP (Digital Download Pro) software which is a basic editor and is better than nothing at all but we need something that offers a little more flexibility, more options and more tools. We need something that fine tunes the RAW images.
We looked at Adobe's Lightroom as a natural accompaniment to Photoshop and we liked what we saw but Hitomi decided on using its rival software, 'Corel's Aftershot Pro' since a lot of her colleagues use it and recommend it and of course she can now point to comparisons on the web that show Corel seemingly to have the upper hand when it comes to things like speed and 'workflow'.

Here is how it looks on the studio computer and how it looks on my second home PC (with English OS) where I usually blog from and do much of my translation work.

Sometimes it is interesting to hear the story behind the photo and you'd see the photo in a new light after hearing such tales. Models can always tell you a story or two about certain images in their portfolios but in most cases a photo shouldn’t need a story to back it up. It has to speak for itself. Consider it as standalone art!
Editing photos can often be the most difficult but it can also be the most satisfying part especially with software like this from Corel. It's not cheating and neither does it detract from the skills needed as a photographer, the eye or the relationship between photographer and camera. It's just a tool to assist in formulating the final presentation. Pictures, no matter how they are created, are meant to be looked at and this then sets the priority. It is not the technology of imaging which is the priority, which of course is fairly important as I've just said but rather the very simple act of viewing. It is like a poem in the way that the poem has a reader that the author hopes to instill a feeling within that readers interpretation. Here then a photo simply has the photographer creating it and the viewer appreciating it.
And for those of you who still cling to the old adage that the camera doesn't lie, I'd like to tell you that mine does!

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