[www.losttracksoftime.com]

Follow the above link to my photos from the recent Lerro Productions photo charter at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga.

The night before the charter started I was out past midnight for dinner and drinks with Pete Lerro and Mitch Goldman, we had a most interesting and stimulating conversation about reality based photography verses digital manipulation and compositing via Photoshop. I am one who always tries to capture the picture as perfectly as possible with the camera, but afterwards use a RAW editor and Photoshop to its fullest for finalizing the image files as my mind's eye wants them to appear. In talking with Pete and Mitch I secretly decided to challenge myself on this charter - to shoot in JPEG only, relying heavily on my camera platform's potential to process internally with the Acros monochrome film simulation mode. It would be a risky move, not having the flexible RAW files to fall back on if I did not ace the exposure settings. In some of these photos I purposely shot at a higher then normal ISO to accentuate the conversion of noise to an important texture, with others I underexposed the shadow areas to add contrast. A 50mm prime lens was used as much as possible to yield the field of view similar to the human eye, and as a throwback to my roots of analog photography.

In conducting this experiment of shooting JPEGs-only I really liked the results, to my tastes this gallery looks less sterile and digital while having a lot more soul. In Photoshop I severely limited myself to the amount of post-processing, doing only minimal tweaking; mainly dodging and burning. All of this has made me think seriously about steering clear of working with RAW for the near future. Less time sitting in front of a computer means more opportunity to be in the field with a camera.

Your thoughts?

Matthew