[Aka]

That's professional studio photography though. You can control the environment there. So while it's impressive he did that all in camera, he still had far greater control over the picture than Jay and I would have with our pictures.

That said, I generally try my best to take the picture 'in camera' so that I don't have to 'shop it later. Since I shoot RAW I always have to do some post-processing, such as sharpness and contrast. The last two pictures I posted above had this done to them (check the EXIF, should say I used Nikon Capture NX). I generally try and stick to what you could do if you had film, you can have oversaturated pictures (Velvia film I think does that effect), you can overexpose/underexpose in processing, so I can lighten darken my pictures to some extent. As for sharpness, that's just a side-effect of digital photography and how the sensors/pixels work.

The one thing I wish my camera had was more range, it seems if there's something really bright, and dark, I have to pick between the two, I can't get a whole shot. But I see people with film do it all the time. Newer SLRs have better range than mine does I think. I've thought about trying HDR photography, but just haven't bothered yet. Would it be concidered 'cheating' and not worthy of being called a photograph anymore?

(are my pictures worthy?)