Lightloom's latest feature allows you to blur your photos, but is it really that great?
So I got an email this morning in my inbox, and chances are high that if you’re photographer such as myself you’ll have received it most likely as well. I’ve been checking the article for the last 30 minutes and have to be honest that I find it quite impressive. Here’s what it can look like:
Copywright: Adobe
This is a pretty sexy photo, and the settings look impressive. As a technical engineer who works with a lot of interesting technology and SaaS solutions, this is like heaven. But as a professional film and digital photographer, I’m not so sure.
See, the issue for me is that photography is about capturing a moment the way it happened. If I’m capturing a fast-moving object and I want to blur the background, I shoot manually and make it happen. Yes, there will be a failure rate, but that’s why we can adjust the settings in the camera accordingly, and we might get another shot if it’s at a race track. If you photograph aeroplanes, another aeroplane will then be your test subject.
If you want to blur the object but not the background, you can do that, too. You just need to understand the basics of photography. And it’ll make you feel really epic if you know how to get the shot you want using your skills. In the photo above, with a very low aperture or a zoom lens with maybe F2.8, you could achieve this effect naturally by just knowing how to use your camera (settings) and understanding something like compression.
In today’s world, we are used to sexy crips, Instagram photos etc., but in my opinion, we lost touch with what photography is in the first place. The unfiltered view of the photographer that he/she found at that time specific time truthfully replicated into analogue or digital form. Look, AI is an interesting technology, but speaking as a photographer and having been bombarded with AI photography tools, it dumbs us down to mindless button clickers.
It’s said that today, everyone can be a photographer. I disagree. We buy the latest and greatest gear, but yet we use too much software to create an image we know will look great on Instagram or social media, an image we wish we could’ve created ourselves. We might not have the patience to do it or don’t want to get up for that early sunrise, so we rely on Lightroom, etc., to help us achieve it. But answer me this. Do you think you remain truthful to yourself doing so? Do you think you faithfully document that moment in time?
And while I’m a huge fan of Lighteoom as catalog and editing program, I think this is a feature I won’t be using. Not because it won’t be fun but I feel that we as photographers should hone our skills. Let me know what you think or if you have tried it already.
Edit: Never say never. I tried the tool in some of my shots and the results weren’t too bad. It depends if the main subject is isolated from people within a shallow depth of field behind them. In that case it didn’t work that well. But overall quite useful.