I receive requests by e-mail to help people with their photos. They'll send me a flattering message telling me how much they appreciate my work, they've seen one or more messages in a forum, etc.

As many of you know, I'm a rather busy guy. In addition to this site and avid hobbies of digital photography and guitar, I direct the State Data Center on Aging at the University of South Florida, perform program evaluations for the State of Florida, teach graduate and undergraduate students, and write for both peer-reviewed journals and trade publications. On top of that, I'm a married dad. The point of waving my activities is to point out that when I spend fifteen minutes composing an answer on a forum or a half hour coaching someone one-to-one about their photos, that's time I'm taking from other projects.

I was amazed at the display of gratitude I received today.

I received this request a little over a week ago:

Hello,
I have seen some of your posts on the forums and you seem to be someone experienced with photoshop. I have taken several photographs of mostly of landscapes. I take photos as a hobby, but I would like to improve. Some of my photos seem to dark or hazy because of atmospheric perspective, but I was wondering if they could possibly be improved through photoshop. I would be greatful if you could possibly edit some (or one) of my photos. I can e-mail it to you if you decide that you are willing to take a look. I also welcome any advice and tips that you can give me!
Thanks,
[name deleted]

I agreed to help. I asked that we start with one photograph. She sent one. It was flat and dull with the foreground of aspine flowers underexposed, the mountain highlights overexposed and some highlights burned out, and the mountain had a bluish haze. But I could see a lot of potential in the photo.

I loaded the photo into CS4, applied a saturation boost, added a shadows/highlights layer with a layer mask to brighten the alpine flowers, added another shadows/highlights layer with layer mask to restore detail in the mountain and sky, and applied the TLR Clarity action from the new TLR Professional Sharpening Actions collection. I did all of this in Photoshop CS4, saved a JPEG of the retouch, saved screenshots of the settings and the Layers panel, and then composed a message that described what I did, so she could replicate the work.

I routinely ask people if, in return for my time and personal attention, I can use the photo in tutorials, etc. Giving them full credit, of course.

Here were my comments yesterday:

The retouch took 5-10 minutes. The screenshots took another 10 minutes or so. Then there was saving the file, composing the e-mail, etc. Add the revious e-mails, I spent about an hour of my life trying to help a total stranger.

Here's the reply I received tonight:

Someone can try to talk me down about my reply:

(1) The files were simple JPEGs.

(2) As you all know, the site is available to anyone with a browser.

(3) This person approached me via Photography-on-the.net AND this site has received visits from hundreds of Photography-on-the.net members.

I try to interpret benign motivations. But it sure sounds like this person intends to take the retouch I made and enter it into a contest. Why else pretend they cannot open a JPEG or visit my site, except to be able to deny receiving any assistance with the photo?! Why did they not ask me to send the retouch in a different format?

At a minimum, I felt like I was treated rather dismissively. She could have explained about the contest. She could have asked me to wait until after the contest. Etc.

I would like to show you the before/after. I could. She asserted no copyright when she sent me the photo. It is the difference between a photo that was flat, dull, and suffered from  dynamic range issues AND a photo that would have a good chance of winning a contest.  I could even assert copyright to the retouch. But I won't do either. I don't want to deter others seeking help by publishing work of others without permission.

I wanted to use this photo to begin a new feature on this site. A regular series of coaching sessions. I don't mind helping people, but I prefer helping many to helping just one individual. That's why I always ask to share my coaching with the wider digital photography community.

There is another person who has been waiting patiently for some additional mentoring. You can see several of his photos in my software review of Nik Dfine 2. I'm sure he'll generously agree to lbe the first and allowing others to learn from the coaching.

This one experience is not going to sour me completely on helping people who write and ask. In fact, I intend to follow up on my plans for the new coaching feature. Feel free to write and ask if one of your photos could be the subject of a coaching session. I can't commit to coaching every request I receive, but I will try to help as many as I possible can, given the demands on my time.

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