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Christian Lalonde teaches you to think outside of the box (11.01.2016)
Canadian photographer Christian Lalonde is holding a workshop at I AM PHOTOGRAPHER Festival 2016 on 6th April.
As part of his impressive repertoire Christian has been named as “Canadian Commercial Photographer of the Year” twice. Christian is the leading judge of the commerce/creative category of WPPI printout competition. He is one of the few Legion Paper’s MOAB Masters (it is a chosen group of photographers who are united by their unique vision and wish to print their works on MOAB paper). Recently, he was named as Dynalite VIP. XP PhotoGear also uses his works on regular bases.
Christian’s experiences in the digital photo processing are remarkable and there are a lot of “fresh breezes” in his works. The fact that photo processing takes more time than the shooting itself is totally natural according to Christian. It all depends on what the final purpose of the photo is. You shouldn’t forget the idea behind the photo. Not for a moment you should let yourself think: “I am going to solve this problem later in Photoshop…”. Usually, what takes a minute during shooting, may take up to 15 minutes or more during photo processing.
I asked Christian whether it was not dangerous to share your experiences and secrets with other photographers. Christian thinks it is not a danger and it is not likely that sharing makes a lot of photographers to produce photos of the same style as his. 15 years of photo processing experience has given Christian a lot of knowledge. Besides, the development of photo processing has been so rapid that it is not possible to use the same style and techniques for a longer period of time.
The same goes for the discussions whether digital photography rules out authentic results since all the photos are being processed. Photo processing was also present during analog photography. Then, the final results were defined by the choice of film or photo paper, the features of the chemistry used. When we are dealing with documental photos, we should keep the processing to a minimum and avoid any kind of manipulation.
There is always something new to learn in the digital photography. There are endless opportunities about what you can read about from the Internet, from photography magazines and when following other photographers’ works. Christian’s principal about learning and development is as follows: “The day I start thinking that I know everything about photography is the day I should start doing something else.”
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