Toper Turor

Postage Stamp Photography and Other Odds and Ends

No, its not about taking photos of postage stamps, ha ha.  Nor is it taking photos to make postage stamps from those images (although, now you can do that).  Postage stamp photography was a term that was used to describe a proof sheet of photos which all looked alike.  Before digital cameras, photographers printed proof sheets.  If they were shooting with a 35mm film camera, there would usually be either 20 or 36 photos per sheet.  If all the images looked the same, "postage stamp" photography was the term used because, well, it looked like a sheet of postage stamps.  Of course, there would be minor differences in the images when viewed through a loupe. 

I used to do headshot photography for models and actors.  Sometimes just a tiny variation in one image from the next would make a huge difference.  Back in the film days, it would take several hours after the shoot to develop and print the proof sheet, assuming you did it yourself.  At first, a group of the images would look all the same, but when examined closely, some would really stand out.  I didnt want to miss that one great shot, so I did some postage stamp photography, although after each shot, tried to get a change in expression.  It did make it difficult to choose from so many good images.  With experience, I knew when I got the shots that were going to be the winners.  The more variations in the shots, the happier the clients.  Instead of a roll of 36 similar photos, maybe there would be four to six of each look with a lot of different looks.

With digital photography, it seems photographers are shooting many more photos than they should.  Many photographers are doing this because they arent really focused (pun intended) on what they need to shoot or dont know or understand lighting, composition, and/or how to pose, so they overshoot to hope they get that a good photo.  After all, it looks easy, and your camera does a lot for you (focuses, exposes correctly (if used correctly) - everything can be automatic).  So just point and shoot.  If you want really good photos, you need to learn a lot more than just point and shoot.  Youll need to learn composition, lighting, posing if you will be doing portraits, and about your cameras settings and lenses.

One setting on your camera is what format you want to shoot - RAW or JPG.  I shoot RAW because if your exposure is off a little due to a mistake (Ive had my share of mistakes), its easy to fix.  For example, maybe you were shooting this scene and aimed your camera at the sky and accidentally locked the exposure at that reading and got the following result (Ive seen many photos on social media that are exposed like this):



If that was a JPG image, you might not be able to salvage it.  But with RAW, it may end up looking like this:


Back in the film days, and without automatic cameras, you had to make sure you metered the scene for the correct film, especially if it was Kodachrome.  Years ago, shooting with my Nikon FTn and what I thought was Kodachrome 100, but was actually Kodachrome 25 (Kodachrome was a color transparency film and very unforgiving for the wrong exposure), I got the following result of a young woman (Purdue University online writing lab idiocracy notwithstanding) posing in a tree:


Also shot with Kodachrome, but with the correct ASA, of the girl and her dog (these were shot in the 1970s and over time the images faded a bit before I was able to scan them and then try to fix in Photoshop and Lightroom):




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