subject: The Digital Photography Background - A Creative Masterpiece! [print this page] The Digital Photography Background - A Creative Masterpiece!
The ability to make use of a digital photography background is among - if not THE biggest advantage of the digital revolution.
Back in historic days of film, when you required a unique sort of background, you were pretty much limited to painted backgrounds or physically going on location. Changing a background was incredibly hard.
Generally, for those who planned to do an easy touch up - such as, delete a waste can from behind your subject - it'd include physically going on the negative and actually painting it out. It had been the same with facial touch-ups.
Accomplishing this seamlessly took a real skill.
Since the negatives were so tiny, this was an extremely difficult job and not many shooters had the proficiency to accomplish it well - or even at all. Therefore, they wound up having to pay trained retouchers to do the work. Not a happy scene.
Another alternative was to print the picture and then physically paint out the offending bit of background...on each individual photograph! Again, not so good. This too took creative skills and took a large amount of time!
The cutout...
The final scheme was to get a razor-sharp knife or razor blade and slice your model from the picture and paste them into a photograph of the scene you required. This never appeared accurate and could be marked as fake a mile away!
So, to get around that, photographers had to spend literally lots of bucks in tangible sets, props, painted backgrounds, etc. - and have a place to stockpile them. This made running a studio a necessity. It was especially difficult to drag those backgrounds and props around and having the customer come to your studio was the only real actual alternative.
Plus, they were costly!
For instance, if we want an image of a baby, sitting inside an antique washtub, against a dappled brown and tan "Old Masters" setting...it was required that we had to buy the "Old Masters" hand painted canvas background.
They sell for for nearly a $1000 for a really expert one. Then we would have to buy an antique washtub. If we could even find one, we could expect to spend $50 - $100.
All of this expense was before we even found out that the the newborn is afraid of washtubs and screamed for the full session.
Enter digital!
Currently, for only a couple dollars we can purchase dozens of digital backdrops! Mostly, what a digital photography background is, is a photograph of a background or perhaps a prop stored on a Disc.
Now for $20 or $30 we get a Disc with digital pictures of dozens of "Old Masters" backdrops, another Disc holds dozens of different varieties of vintage washtubs.
Then we open them up in Photoshop or Gimp, digitally drop the washtub we like in front of the background we like, add in any previously done shot of the infant and ta daaa! In a matter of just a few minutes, we have our newborn sitting in an antique washtub in front of an "Old Masters" backdrop.
No massive cash expense, no scuffling with props or storage, no requirement for any studio! The digital photography background puts brilliantly inventive photography within sight of us all!
