(And now, a word from our sponsor:)
Sometimes, I suck at photography. Bad. I definitely suck at PhotoShop, all the time. This is Laura Musselman. She takes pictures. Dot com.
As a general rule, Laura does not suck at photography. Post-processing or otherwise. Plus, she's nice. And fun. And puts up with me geeking her ear off about equipment every time I'm within shouting distance of her at a show. She's so good that she could be a smug four-letter-word about her work and it wouldn't matter one bit, but she's not. Instead, she's rad.
Laura helps me to figure out what lens I should think about next, and the best things to consider when I want to sell my car to get new equipment. I, in turn, see the kid next to me trying to take pictures with a point and shoot, knowing better than to flash, and I help him figure out how to turn up the ISO so that he can take better shots. Small turns that all add up eventually. That's generally about how most things go here, in a land-of-misfit-toys kind of way.
But I'm not telling you all this to get on the Laura Musselman PR bus, or because she totally saved my ass with a new lens when I shot Death Cab for Cutie at WaMu, or because I'll get a discount at Glazer's for saying so. I'm telling you all this because Laura has single-handedly restored my faith in my own work, with one little word:
Lightroom.
I now suck a little bit less at post-processing than I did yesterday, or last week. And anything that helps with that deserves an honorable mention, at the very least. Those days when it's more suck than magic, those nights when I get home from a show with a bunch of mediocre shots, wondering what the hell I'm doing carrying around a camera and calling myself a photographer. Knowing how to edit properly eases the worst of the blows, it takes things up a few notches from "I can't take pictures anymore, I quit" to "that stinks, but I know what to do next time so that it doesn't happen like that again." Lightroom has made my life easier, and my work better. And save for digging up someone with a student ID to buy permanent software before my free trial ends, I couldn't be happier.
Thanks, girl! You're really the bestest.
/PSA
(We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.)
