Creation of a photo

The shooting

Most of the photos were shot with my old Ricoh Caplio camera or with my new SLR Canon EOS 400D. The Ricoh camera was great to shoot pictures without people noticing it. In order to do this I shot a lot of pictures pretending not to shoot any. By holding the camera next to my waist and maybe looking the other way I got some pretty unexpected shots. With the SLR it is just too loud while shooting. Everbody does know that I am shooting pictures and most of the time looks artificial happy or silly. But more and more people are getting shot voluntarily. So that's great for me as a photographer :)

Before & After

All the pictures here are digital manipulated. To see the difference between the orignal an the final result, check out the following examples.

The process

After I've taken many many pictures it all come down to the following steps:

Selecting the better pictures, trashing most of the others
Cropping the right part of the picture
Getting rid off all the elements that I don't like to be in the picture
(like a street lamp, a cord or some blinking elements)
Getting rid off iretating face elements (pimples, crossing hair, birth marks, ...)
Adjusting the curves, brightness, contrast
Adjusting the color
Sharpen / Blur background
Finished :-)

It takes me probably 10 - 40 minutes for one picture to alter it the way I like it. As a result the pictures most of the time don't look like the original one. To give you an impression of a comparison of the original and the altered version, check out the slideshow.