How much is too much?

They say every day is a new day. And I strongly believe in that. After experimenting for quite a while now, having clicked around four thousand images, giving me 100 odd which I marked 'better', if not the best, than the rest, my D300s keeps hurling surprises at me every day. Keeping everything on auto mode is quite a good and safe way to shoot, but I could have bought a point-n-shoot instead. Having invested so much in the equiment, I think I need to up the risks and explore more. And there I was trying to tweak every setting one by one and checking the results for the differences. Switch the White Balance, and you get Blueish or Orangish images when you forget to flip it back to the correct setting. Switch off NR, and you get noisy images in twilight regardless of the ISO because you forgot to turn the NR back on. Suddenly the images are dark or burnt, I guess this time its the forgotten EV compensation from the earlier shoot. And the list goes on and on.

The good and the bad parts come hand in hand. Good that I have clicked all the images and they look fabulous in the small camera LCD screen. Good that I clicked all that shoot which I wanted to, when I wanted to. Good that I feel an eternal hapiness to hear the shutter release of a DSLR which I always wanted. Bad that the images look not-so-good when I download them to the PC. Bad that some have considerable and visible noise, some with wrong exposure, and some just do not look like the scene as I saw it with your eyes. Bad that most of them need composition correction. Bad that I would be spending five times the time in post processing the images than what was spent clicking them in the first place. I didn't bargain for that, did I?

I think I do not like post processing because I believe the images should be as natural as possible, as real as possible. There is definitely the other side - contrasts, saturations, highlights, midtones and the shadows, making the images catchy, vibrant, and surreal. I like them real, not surreal. To admit, the dark side did lure me in, and after exploring a few images in Lightroom, I did achieve the effects, though not to the level of professional, but quite acceptable. A little tweaking did help to bring out the depth in the images, taking them a little beyond the limitations of 2D. The little for me might be quite a lot for someone in the same way as someone's little is quite a lot for me.

How much is too much? Well, I guess thats what 'every day is a new day' is all about. Every day we learn something new. I think I would carry out my little bit tweaking and grow towards a point where all I need is the camera and the light..