Street Photography and Adobe Lightroom

Yesterday I went out to the streets of Port Elizabeth and explored with average street photography. Goodness, I wonder what people think when they see me sneaking up on them and taking a photo of them. Luckily for me, I'm using a bridge camera with a good 50x zoom, it's easy for me to take a photo of people without them even knowing. I can do so with a good 30 - 50meters of distance between me and them, almost like a real spy.

The camera that I'm using produces a lot of digital noise in its pictures due to the extremely small sensor. For those that don't know, Image noise is a random variation of brightness or color information in images and is usually an aspect of electronic noise. It can be produced by the sensor and circuitry of a scanner or digital camera. Image noise can also originate in film grain and in the unavoidable shot noise of an ideal photon detector.

This forced me to use the Adobe Lightroom software or the smartphone Adobe Lightroom Application for all my photos. With using Lightroom, the software enabled me to think and be a bit more creative with my photography. Let me give you a small example of noise reduction:

This is just a photo of an average goat that I took in the streets of Port Elizabeth.

Lets zoom in to the eye of the goat and look at the digital image noise

This is the image without any editing, one can clearly see the grain of the image noise.

This is the big improvement done on Adobe Lightroom using the noise reduction function. In my opinion it is a good function but can reduce the level of detail in a photo.

In conclusion I'll share my Street Photography of Port Elizabeth. Light room enabled me to play around with better skin tones and even improve the dynamic range of my photos. I will divide the photographs in the order of original, edited and black and white.

Enjoy: