The Digital Photography Background - A Creative Masterpiece!

The ability to use a digital photography background is one of - if not THE biggest benefit of the digital revolution.Back in the olden days of film, when you wanted a specific type of background, you were pretty much limited to painted backdrops or actually going on location. Changing a background was very difficult. Typically, if you wanted to do a simple touch up - for example, remove a trash can from behind your subject - it would involve actually going onto the negative and physically painting it out. It was the same with facial touch-ups.Doing this seamlessly took a real talent.Since the negatives were so small, this was a very difficult task and few photographers had the skill to do it well - or even at all. Thus, they wound up paying professional retouchers to do the work. Not a happy scene.The other alternative was to print the photo and then physically paint out the offending bit of background...on each individual print! Again, not so good. This too took artistic talent and took a lot of time!The cutout...The last method was to take a sharp knife or razor blade and cut your model out of the photo and paste them into a picture of the scene you wanted. This never looked right and could be spotted as phony a mile away!So, to get around that, photographers had to invest literally thousands of dollars in physical sets, props, painted backdrops, etc. - plus have a place to store them. This made operating a studio a necessity. It was very difficult to lug those backdrops and props around and having the client come to you was the only real option.Plus, they were expensive!For example, if we want a photo of a baby, sitting in an antique washtub, against a mottled brown and tan "Old Masters" background...it used to be that we would have to buy the "Old Masters" hand painted canvas background.They go for around a $1000 for a really good one. Then we would have to buy an antique washtub. If we could even locate one, we could expect to pay $50 - $100.All of this outlay was before we even found out that the baby is terrified of washtubs and screamed throughout the entire session.Enter the digital photography background!Now, for just a couple bucks we can buy dozens of digital backdrops! Basically, what a digital photography background is, is a photograph of a background or a prop stored on a CD. Now for $20 or $30 we buy a CD with digital photos of dozens of "Old Masters" backdrops, another CD holds dozens of different styles of antique washtubs.Then we open them up in Photoshop or Gimp, digitally drop the washtub we like in front of the backdrop we like, add in a previously done shot of the baby and ta daaa! In a matter of just a couple minutes, we have our baby sitting in an antique washtub in front of an "Old Masters" backdrop. No huge cash outlay, no struggling with props or storage, no need for a studio! The digital photography background puts brilliantly creative photography within reach of us all!