Two men engage in a game of Chinese chess while a group of onlookers crowds around them.

You can accomplish a lot in 10 minutes. Case in point are the photographs in this post. I was out shooting some assignment work the other day and heading from one location to the next when I spied these two men playing a game of Chinese chess, with a group on onlookers crowding around. I approached, watched for a while and then photographed a single frame when the time felt right. Other than import it to Lightroom, I didn’t do anything with the photo until yesterday. While waiting for a reply to a message I’d sent, I opened up Lightroom and browsed a few of my more recent photographs that were still unprocessed. This image of the men playing chess, a common scene across the Chinese world, jumped out at me. Below you can see the almost unprocessed version – all it has is a slight crop.

The original.

It doesn’t do it for me. When reviewing the photograph I could see a distinct possibility that existed in the scene but it was one that required a little bit of work to get. Not much mind you – all the variations you see here were created in less than 10 minutes of editing time. For what it’s worth, the opening shot is the version that corresponds to what was in my mind. In the process of getting there however, I tried a few different things, all of which you can see below.

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Version 5

Version 6

What this post is trying to get at is that a photograph can have infinite possibilities, and it often doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to explore those possibilities. Lightroom, or any other photo editing application is simply another tool for a photographer to use to achieve the look they want. Some may still persist in their belief that the use of these tools is cheating in some way but at the end of the day, it’s the final image that is the key. Choice of lens, camera format, aperture, shutter speed, time of day, location, software, darkroom processes, film, weather, subject etc all go into making a photograph. None of it exists in a vacuum. Go ahead and play. Experiment to your heart’s content. From the time of the very first photograph in history, and well into the future, that’s what photography has been about.