From last weekend

Last weekend was a busy one. I took more than 800 pictures, and on Sunday, I edited them down to 463 high-quality images, which can be downloaded here. Facebook kills any picture published there. If you want any of my original pictures download it using this link. 

This last weekend I photographed a Karate event whose theme was the Terracotta Warriors from China. All the pictures from this event were taken using a Canon R6 Mark I and the EF 70-200mm f/2.8 Lens Mark II. This lens was first released by Canon in 2010, but looking at these pictures, you would never guess they were taken with a 15-year-old lens. If a lens is good, it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Why am I still using an older lens? Price. You can buy this lens for less than half of what you would pay for the latest RF version.

But a good lens alone isn’t enough to create great pictures. I spent more than 12 hours editing all the photos. First, I reviewed them all and selected the ones I wanted to edit. After that, I ran the selected pictures through DXO PureRaw to remove noise. Then I imported the cleaned images into Adobe Lightroom Classic, where the real editing process began.

Adjustments to contrast, white balance, blacks, and whites were made to achieve the final results, which you can enjoy on my Facebook page and Flickr. Pictures straight out of the camera are an unfinished product that require work to reach their full potential.

The main difference between someone simply taking pictures and a photographer is the time the latter spends on post-processing. Keep that in mind.

Here are few more pictures from this event.