A couple of days back I published a blog on www.thelightweightphotographer.com, which is my other site. This outlined how, working with a fellow photographer to review, process and print images, I tackled a number of areas of photography that had been frustrating me for a while. Following this I decided I would publish a second blog on Lenscraft about another aspect of the day that had nothing to do with Lightweight Photography.

I should probably start by giving you some idea of what all this is about. Steve is a very talented fellow photographer whom I tend to go on a shoot with once every 4-6 weeks. With the onset of summer the light is turning bright and harsh so we decided we wouldn't spend time trying to fight this, but get together to review our printed work and try to improve it. We therefore decided to try an exercise where we would work together on an image that one of us had shot. What you see above is the resulting image. I should also make it clear that Steve is a traditional B&W film photographer who is a wizard in the darkroom and because of this tends not to use Photoshop very much.

I originally shot the picture about a year ago and whilst I thought it had potential, I had struggled to realise it. We started by agreeing a cropped area from the image and then moved on to adjust contrast, brightness, saturation and sharpness, most of which was done to locally rather than to the whole of the image. The changes were also more subtle than I would have made if I had been left to my own devices. Together however we discussed the image and this seemed to lead to quite subtle and restrained changes very different to my usual style but still very effective. By the way, the blog software I am using isn't very friendly to Portrait images so what you see here isn't showing at its best. If you want to get a better idea of the image click the Full Image link to the bottom left of the page.

Once we had finished the adjustments we made an inkjet print. I have to admit this print is beautiful. It's subtle with lovely tones and colour and has an unusual depth to it. I would never have edited the image in this way if I had been making decisions on my own and I am delighted with the results.

If you know a fellow photographer with a different style to your own, this collaboration exercise might prove very interesting.