Tourists pause in the evening at the end of a pier on San Francisco Bay
I was in San Francisco to meet up with a group of fellow (mostly) street photographers, first for dinner along the fringe of Chinatown and then out to make photographs afterwards. We finished dinner and headed out before sunset, beginning by photographing in the long shadows cast by early evening light in the downtown canyons. Since many in the group wanted to photograph the waterfront we headed that direction. I was geared up more for night street photography — typically done handheld rather than with the tripod I might choose to use for architectural or urban landscape photography — but I hung in with the group anyway.
At the waterfront, after wandering in and around some buildings, the group was of a collective mind to head out on one of the pedestrian piers that juts out into the Bay. Again, this was a bit different from what I had in mind, but there is no denying the attractions of being out over the surface of the Bay as the evening comes on and things quiet down. I photographed some fishermen, a few passing boats, bridges, and back towards the urban waterfront buildings.Eventually, as it became quite a bit darker, I took a moment to photograph a small group of what I assume must have been friends, sitting out near the end of the pier and conversing in the fading light.
A red-tailed hawk perches on the top of a fence post.
Birds like this one are everyone in the west once you start looking for them, though they are not often easy to approach. In a place like this, where there are many thousands of other birds, these raptors are always there but in much smaller numbers. I frequently see them perched high in large trees or flying past, sometimes provoking reactions from the other birds.
This one teased me a bit. The first time I saw it, much earlier in the day, it was standing on this same fence post and watching a nearby field. Every so often it would take off and, I presume, hunt for something to eat before returning a few minutes later. I never was able to get close to it, so I stayed at a distance and watched. I returned much later in the day, when warm early sunset light was shining on the bird and starting to turn the sky pink. As I drove past on the gravel road it didn’t budge, so I stopped and rolled down a window and photographed it perching on “its” fence post.
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→
Night photograph of a closed Chinatown shop, San Francisco
In early September I again joined a group of folks who like to photograph San Francisco urban and street subjects after dark. Most of the group met before sunset, did a bit of street photography, joined for dinner at a place along the edge of Chinatown, and then headed out for a couple of hours of photographing in the urban nightscape. Once again we passed through Chinatown — hard to resist when we were already there! — and on down into areas closer to Market Street.
Late in the evening it was time for me to head back to my car, so I said good-bye to the rest of the group and headed back the way I had come, walking alone this time. It was now much later, and this area pretty much shuts down — surprisingly so for a Saturday night in The City. But this meant that the earlier crowds were gone and the scene was a lot quieter and slower. When I passed this corner earlier the shop was open and there were quite a few people around, but now the shutters were closed and the green light washed over the urban landscape of sidewalks and steps leading up toward a dark alley. After years of doing night photography the “old way” — tripod and long exposures — I’m still amazed that I can wander out and shoot stuff like this using a small handheld camera these days.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
