A forum discussion in which I recently participated (it involved an ethical question related to providing GPS coordinates for a photography destination) has me thinking today about how much information to reveal about photography subjects and locations and the factors that we might want to consider as we share such things. With that in mind, here is a link to something I posted on this topic after a conversation with a photographer friend who is a retired Yosemite ranger.
Category Archives: Ideas
What a Photograph Is and What It Ain’t
Every so often I post something lengthy in some photography forum or another, and sometimes I want to get as much mileage out of it as a can… so I share it here. Recently there was a discussion about exposure blending and HDR and related stuff in one such forum and people were trying to decide whether HDR is a good, bad, useful, or indifferent thing. I posted a few times in that thread, but here is the final thing I added.
A poster read and quoted the following:
With our knowledge of post-processing techniques, are we involuntarily pre-disposed to see what could have been rather than what is? Does that limit our ability to appreciate the “what is”?
And then responded this way:
It definitely didn’t seem to limit Ansel’s appreciation of what is. You can see quotes throughout all of his books for many varying scenes on how beautiful it was. But then he will also say that he envisioned the final print as ‘stronger’ and did what was necessary to achieve his vision of the scene. Unless you aren’t talking about a live scene but rather a photo – a ‘plain’ photo that tried to capture ‘what is’. I don’t photograph to try and recreate what is. I would find that a waste of time and boring and leaving little in the way of artistic interpretation of the scene. I try to create a photograph using whatever tools necessary to achieve my vision of a given scene and hopefully with a somewhat unique outcome. But I will never limit myself to trying to replicate ‘reality’ as my eye saw it. I still appreciate what is, just not in my photos.
After that I offered up:
This brings up an interesting subject and one that seems to afflict landscape photography discussions more than it does discussions of other types of photography, namely this notion that a photograph “captures” what is “real” and that this can and should be its goal – and, by extension, anything that “manipulates” that “real” thing is somehow wrong and should be called out.
There is very little support anywhere for that idea, at least in the pure form that some seem to think it might have. Virtually every landscape photographer has said or will tell you today and shows through his or her own work that the idea of a photograph as an objective record of “what was there” is both impossible and undesirable. “Recording” the objective, physical nature of the subject – whatever the heck that even is – is almost completely missing the point.
First, it is impossible.
If we assume that the landscape that we see when in its actual presence at the time of the exposure is an objective and real thing, it is obvious that the camera cannot accurately capture that thing. There is a whole list of reasons for this to be the case, and it could include the following and more:
- The reality of the place is a continuum of light and seasons and atmosphere and more, yet the photograph only “captures” a tiny slice of the continuum that defines that subject.
- The camera cannot record all of the elements that define the nature of that subject – not the movement of air, the smell, the warmth of the sun, the exertion required (or not) to be there, and much more.
- The camera cannot “see” the scene the same way that our visual system does – which is the primary subject of this thread. I’ll just point out that bright clouds don’t blow out and shadows are not blocked and leaves don’t blur in the wind when we use our visual system to view them directly.
- The photographer’s most basic choices “edit” and transform the reality of the scene in important ways: where to place the camera, when to click the shutter, what to include/exclude from the scene, focal length, whether aperture choices make everything in focus or are selective, what the shutter speed does to moving elements of the scene, and much more.
- Other things that would make this list too long for this thread… ;-)
Second, even if it were possible it would be undesirable.
Let’s use Adams as an example. What moves many about his photographs is not the extent to which they are objectively “real” – fundamentally, they are not real. (The last time I checked, the world was not black and white.) What sets his work apart is the way that he used the tools at hand to interpret (not literally reproduce) the subjects of his photographs and the resulting personality and point of view that are expressed in his work. In other words, the literal subjects were, arguably, primarily a means for Adams to share his point of view and his passions through his photographs. In the end, the photographs tell us more about Adams than they tell us about his subjects. (I used Adams here because he is most likely to be known to all reading the thread, but virtually any other “landscape” photographer’s work would serve as well.)
To loop back to the thread, virtually all serious landscape (and other) photographers understand that it is an essentially unquestioned truth that photographs do not and cannot “accurately” portray the real subject, that they inherently (and aren’t we glad!) express a point of view, and that the notion of a pure “unmanipulated” “capture” is a strange and impossible concept. (Yet, for reasons that I won’t explore here, it seems to persist…)
This means that things are complicated. There is no “right” mode of expression, no “right” or wrong techniques, and no “right” type or amount of modification of a photograph in post. It is all relative and subjective. Some who like to imagine that a world of absolutes would simplify things find this difficult to understand and accept. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we could just declare that HDR or exposure blending or adding saturation or using curves or cloning out a spot were “wrong” because they were manipulations of the original “truth” of the scene and dismiss them as being objectively wrong or even dishonest, unethical, or immoral? But we can’t, if for no other reason than once you start down that absolutist road you would have to exclude most or arguably even all photography.
In the end it is about judgment and taste and the power of the photographer’s personal expression – and not simply an accounting of which techniques were used. Perhaps the least important thing about a photograph is how it was made.
RAW File Review – Rediscovering the Past
After returning from New York City last week, I took on the daunting task of reviewing about eight years worth of raw files. (Anyone who has tried probably just exclaimed, “yikes!,” or something much less polite… :-)
I’m _very_ conservative when it comes to deleting raw files, figuring that it is better to end up keeping files I don’t need than to find out that I trashed something that could have been useful. In addition, as I do an annual review of the previous year’s raw files every winter, I invariably discover a few good photographs that I had somehow passed over or failed to notice at the time I made them.
As non-fun as the process of reviewing tens of thousands of files can be, there are some worthwhile results, including:
- I do delete a fair number of just plain useless files that have been cluttering up my hard drive. I figure that if it wasn’t interesting a the time I took it, wasn’t interesting during my annual raw file review, and still isn’t interesting a few years later… it may be time to get rid of it.
- I find some (to me, anyway) real treasures that I had overlooked to misunderstood or simply forgotten at the time. At some point I’ll write more about why this happens, but it is not unusual to fail to understand how a photograph works right after making it. But when viewed with some temporal distance, some photographs turn out to surprise me by how successful they might be. So one of the pleasures of this otherwise daunting task is the discovery of such images.
- I relive experiences related to the making the photographs. When I view my own photographs, the visual imagery is always associated with non-visual experiences that were part of the process of making the photo. When I “rediscover” some of these older image – even some that turn out not to be photographically worthy of sharing – I also rediscover those experiences that I had forgotten and all sorts of memories return. (Among those in this batch are many of my family – especially fun during the week when our youngest son moved off to a different city of get his first job.)
- I learn things about my own photographic growth that might not be apparent when only considering the most current work. For example, I’m often struck by how certain themes and ways of seeing that I’ve come to recognize more recently were already present in work done quite a while ago. Understanding this is important, I think, to developing self-awareness as a photographer.
Brief Thoughts on The Life of a Photograph
The image I posted earlier today both here at the blog and on Google+ got me thinking about the various ways that a photograph can “come to life.” This particular image followed a path that several other images that I consider to be among my best followed – namely, it languished in my raw file archive for nearly a year before I rediscovered it recently while going back through the old files. I recognized this pattern some time ago, and I now make it a habit to revisit all of my (thousands and thousands of) raw files about a year after I shoot them.
Why didn’t I “see” this image when I first reviewed raw files right after the shoot? I’m not entirely certain, but several ideas come to mind. Sometimes at the time of the shoot I have a strongly fixed notion of how I want to portray the subject , and as I shoot I’m already categorizing exposures by how well they correspond to this preconception. So when I initially go through the raws I may be mostly looking for what fits my expectations as opposed to looking objectively at what works on its own merits. Coming back a year later allows me to better see the image for what it is, without having my judgment so affected by prior expectations.
Related to this is the sheer number of images and how one deals with them in the post-processing workflow. I may begin with what I think are the most promising couple of images from a shoot and then take them all the way to a print-ready (or actually printed) stage. Once I’ve done that with the first selects from a given subject, I’m more likely to move on to other subjects – and potentially leave other good images in the dust.
There is a lot more to say about this, I think, but I’ll save the longer explication for another blog post in the future. Does anyone else make a practice of doing a full review of raw files at some future date?