Fantastic Video for Photographers: Get Inspired From Stu Maschwitz’s Artistic/Lightroom Agility

Screen capture from the video, mid-crop

This is a fantastic video for photographers.

(Note: I couldn't get it to work in Firefox; it worked for me in Safari.)

In it, visual artist Stu Maschwitz
sits down to a blacked-out Lightroom catalog loaded with a couple dozen
photos submitted by strangers, and one by one he unveils and processes them
as the whim strikes him, providing a running commentary about his artistic
reasons for doing things, or technical comments about how to achieve in
Lightroom whatever look he's going for.

There are some amazing transformations, but whether a particular result
is or isn't your cup of tea is not the point. The point is to see that
amazing transformations can be made so easily, and sometimes so subtly. The running commentary on the hows and whys provide ample little seeds that may
germinate ideas when processing your own photos.

Foremost this video is about artistic interpretation. Secondly it's about Lightroom,
because all the “hows” are shown in terms of Lightroom. But let me be clear, it's not an instructional video. It's not a “how-to”
video, and it's not a demonstration of the “right way” to process photos.
(The only time “right way” comes into photo processing is in journalism,
where it's a synonym for “nothing”.)

It's just Stu looking at a stranger's photo and instantly deciding what
that photo's “story” is to him, and then proceeding to crop and adjust the
photo so that as far as he's concerned, it better tells that story.

I found it highly entertaining, and I came away both with new artistic
techniques and new Lightroom techniques.

If you're a photographer, I highly recommend it whether you use Lightroom or not.