In addition to more than a dozen of my photographs, the show includes prints from a talented group of photographic artists and friends that I invited to collaborate on the project: Jerry Bosworth, Franka Mlikota Gabler, Charlotte Hamilton Gibb, David Hoffman, Vidya Kane, and Kerby Smith.
From the Yosemite Renaissance website:
Over the past two months, artist in residence G Dan Mitchell has been photographing Yosemite during the transition from winter into spring. It is an unpredictable time, rich in imagery for photographers as late winter storms challenge the new growth of spring. Wildflowers appear first, poppies and many others. Dogwoods come next, encouraged by warming temperatures and clearing snow. At the same time temperatures suddenly drop and snow falls in unpredictable ways. Daffodils and irises are suddenly covered in snow. G Dan and six other photographers have done their best to capture this magical time in and around Yosemite. The show will include over 40 works documenting the transition. Proceeds from the exhibit will benefit Yosemite Renaissance. Please join us!
Gallery 5
40982 Hwy 41, Suite 5, Oakhurst CA
559-683-5551
The task of selecting a small set of annual favorites is both a joy and a chore. It is a joy to traverse the year in photographs, recalling the circumstances of the creation of each photograph. This years photographic opportunities ranged across a spectrum. Photograph of the natural world included work from the Sierra, Death Valley, the Pacific Coast, and migratory bird habitats in California and Oregon. Photography of the human world included night photography done on both coast of the United States plus extensive travel in the UK, Paris, Germany, Italy, and a few other spots.
I started with nearly 40 photographs — way too many for a favorites list. With the help of social media friends who viewed photographs, rated, and commented on photographs, I cut the set to about half that number. After a final round of comment and critique, I (brutally, it feels) cut the set to only ten photographs, with half from the human world and half from the natural world.
Over the past few weeks the arguments about “photoshopping” and “manipulation” have again come to the fore, this time as the result of the so-called “scandal” around alterations to some photographs by Steve McCurry. The discussions have evolved in all sorts of ways — as they typically do — some of which I regard as unfortunate: pronouncements about which techniques are “ethical” or “unethical,” declarations that photographs must be “true,” the usual stuff about “getting it right in the camera,” and more. In my view, much of this is naive and unrealistic.
Sierra Nevada Trees And Granite
At the heart of the issue are some problematic notions, including the following.
The camera sees accurately, and any modification of what comes out of the camera subverts the camera’s truth. Some assume that the way the machine “sees” is more accurate than the way our eyes and brains see, and that it is the preferred mode of seeing. There are huge problems with this assumption, beginning with the fact that people and cameras see in very different ways. (I’m more interested in how people see.) The eyes scan a scene, adapting to localized elements of the subject, and the full image never exists aside from a kind of mental abstraction of it. The camera non-selectively records light levels from the entire scene at one instant, all with the same “settings.” There’s much more to this, and the subject is far too big to fully deal with here. Suffice it to say that your eyes/brain are not a camera, and this makes a very big difference.
Modifying photographs in post-production (or “post”) makes them less honest and accurate. Some think that modifying what comes from the camera is dishonest. In fact, if the way that humans see is our model for accurate seeing, as I believe it should be, the way the camera sees is often quite inaccurate. (Who sees in black and white or telephoto or with tilt/shift adjustments or with colored filters or constrained to rectangles?) In order to render an image that is more faithful to the way humans see, it is often necessary to massage the image that comes from the camera.
The use of techniques for “manipulating” or “photoshopping” photographs is unethical. Some take the position that “manipulating” images is wrong, but it seems absurd to make such a blanket statement. If your photograph was slightly underexposed, how is it unethical to increase the brightness in post so that it looks exactly as it would have looked with a slightly longer exposure? How can it be OK to use a telephoto lens but not OK to crop in post? Why would it be OK to use a tilt/shift lens but not to adjust perspective lines in post? Are the “rules” the same for photojournalism and for photographic abstractions?
People often want to see this set of issues as a binary, where things are either right or wrong, but it is nothing like that at all.
Before I offer an example, I would like you to try an exercise — and doing it and considering the results is very important for understanding what follows. Go look at some subject in the bright sun that includes some shadows. As you do, look at the brightest areas in the scene, and consider whether you can see any details, however faint, in those brightest areas. You should be able to. Now shift your gaze to a shaded area. You should be able to see some detail there, too. (Your pupils likely closed down a bit when you looked at the bright area — in photographic terms, you used a smaller aperture — and they likely opened up a bit when you looked at the shadow area.)
This presents a classic photographic problem. Virtually no digital camera and no film can handle the widest dynamic ranges of common scenes that we photograph. Producing a realistic photograph of such scenes requires “manipulation,” and without it the scene will not correspond at all to what we see. Continue reading Photographs and Reality: A Complicated Relationship→
(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail. A companion article looks at post processing issues related to the same subject.)
Landscape photographs depend on many things: good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, experience that helps predict when and where to find “right place at the right time,” sensitivity and experience that help you recognize the potential in a scene, being able to think beyond the intrinsic beauty of a scene to consideration of how it might make a photograph, an intuitive sense of “what is right” visually, the ability to apply some objective thought on top of the intuition, and other things in a list that is too long to recount completely.
I would like to share some of the thinking that went into photographing one particular scene earlier this summer.
Trees grow on a small, rocky island in the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park
Back in mid-July I experienced a special evening in the Tuolumne Meadows Sierra Nevada of Yosemite National Park. It was special for many reasons — some photographic and some not, but even the non-photographic reasons helped put my mind and my senses in the right place to make photographs. I had arrived and set up camp, taken care of camp chores, and finally headed out for late-afternoon and evening photography. I pulled off the road to take a look at a possible subject, and by remarkable coincidence found myself parked behind two good friends who were there for much the same reason. We joined forces and headed of to a nearby area that seemed promising. In an even more remarkable coincidence, partway there two more friends showed up, also there for the same purpose! Something about hiking off into a beautiful landscape with like-minded friends seems to heighten my awareness.
