A Strawberry Pie Morning

In honor of Mom’s birthday, here’s a blog post about strawberry pie (from a photographer’s perspective)! 🙂


In last week’s Photo Coaching webinar, we discussed a good photography quote from Gina Milicia: “Beware of turning your images into Twizzlers.”

Twizzlers are generally strawberry flavored. They’re supposed to taste like strawberries. But it sure takes a lot of ingredients to make them taste that way!

Now take a real strawberry on the other hand. How many ingredients does it take to make it taste like a strawberry? Uh, one. It’s the real deal. Gina concludes her quote by making the point, “A great image will still be a great image with very little post-production.”

This is really great advice. A great photo isn’t great because of the way it was edited. It was great before it was edited.

Look for those kind of photos.

But it doesn’t mean that photo editing doesn’t play an important role. Sometimes the camera just can’t pick up the dynamic range that the eye can see. Or maybe the colors just aren’t the same. A RAW photo doesn’t even try to capture what you saw. It just captures raw information.

So, editing is important.

And there’s something that happened after the webinar that confirmed this point which I thought was pretty interesting.

Before the webinar, I sent all the submissions that were made for the previous month’s photo assignment to the publisher for him to choose a winner. He chose one and I announced it on the webinar. (You can see who the winner was here.) I also proceeded to critique everyone’s submissions during the webinar. For a submission made by Ezra, I showed him how I think a little post processing would have helped make an already nice photo look a little more nice.

Screenshot 2021-03-10 122830

I didn’t think much about it after the webinar. By order of procedure, I sent all the rest of the submissions to the publisher, which included Ezra’s photo, so they could be used for whatever relevant purposes the publisher wanted to use them for.

Well, not long after the webinar, I got this email from the publisher.

Screenshot 2021-03-10 115527

So yeah. Editing is important.

Editing isn’t assembling ingredients to make something taste like a strawberry. It’s taking a real strawberry and turning it into a real strawberry pie . . . a strawberry pie that your clients will simply not be able to resist.

A Strawberry Pie Morning
Countryside near West Milford, West Virginia
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And in case you were wondering, here’s what the RAW strawberry looked like. Smile

210204_James Staddon_3756 Canon EOS 5D Mark III, 20 mm, 1-30 sec at f - 5.6, ISO 100

One Comment

  1. Robert Staddon March 10, 2021 at 7:23 pm #

    Great analogy, bro. And spectacular photos!

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