In and Out of the Light

Tags

art, artifice, artists, blind alleys, film, fine art, garbage, mood, photographers, reality, technicians, technology

It’s a little ironic – I suppose I might say more than a little – that, as I survey a basement filled with cameras and lenses, I have finally begun to embrace imperfection as an underlying aesthetic rather than as an annoyance to be actively squelched.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money collecting the most technically perfect equipment only to find that the technically perfect results I obtained were of almost completely devoid of artistry.

Why did I waste so much time and effort on this?

Partly it’s the fault of the photographic community. Far too many photographers are technicians and not artists. As a beginner, you don’t really grasp this. You in thrall of those who spout the jargon and use the most impressive (as in lauded) equipment. You look at your little consumer camera with its kit lens and feel quite inadequate. You feel that way because you’ve already fallen into the biggest trap of all, the technology trap. The technology trap exists solely to promote camera equipment sales and as such it is relentlessly encouraged. You learn that so-called ‘professionals’ use expensive equipment, for that is what a professional is supposed to use. Never mind that the improvements offered by a $2000 lens over a $200 lens will be invisible to most eyes, the fact that a pixel-peeper magnifying his or her screen to 100% can see better sharpness right in the corner of a frame (where no one looks anyway) is used as a weird justification for such upgrades.

It’s pathetic really. None of this has anything to do with art – and by that I mean real art, not the ‘fine art’ garbage promulgated by the technicians as some sort of pinnacle of achievement. The sort of crap that dominates popular photography sites but would never be seen in an art museum or gallery because it really is empty of any meaning or soul whatsoever.

I really feel in a way for the technician photographer. Take them to an art museum and they are the type that sneer at modern art – ‘could be done by a child’, ‘this is worth that much?’ – I’ve heard this and worse over and over again. It’s a emptiness of imagination, a rigidity of thought, and an outlook of frightening blindness.

I can’t stand these people – as photographers that is, in other respects they can be lovely people. They represent a dead end. Fortunately, there’s no law saying I have to associate with them. Give me a child with a cheap cell phone and you’ll get more interesting pictures than any number of technicians with their supermegapixel sized sensors and their lenses with their near perfect MTF (modulation transfer function) graphs.

So back to imperfection. Such as in these two black and white photographs from Henry, Illinois, on a foggy night just before Thanksgiving. Photographs taken with a very old (1959 vintage) manual focus lens. Complete with flare and ghosting, on an obsolete medium (film) pushed to its limit by overdeveloping. Full of grain and optical flaws, but, to me, totally lovely in their moodiness. To get this in digital would take hours of Photoshop tweaking or using as shortcut some film emulation routine. And even then it would not be the same, and all the time you’d be rebelling against the imperfection because you’ve been trained to think that imperfection is bad. Brainwashed really.

Breaking free of this has been the greatest and most important shift in my photographic outlook since I began. It’s not a guarantee of better photographs, but it’s a damn certain guarantee of more interesting ones.

 

 

Staying true to the image

Tags

artificiality, cloning, digital, film, manipulation, photography, Photoshopping, reality

I am always amused (but no longer that surprised) at how many images offered up at my local photography critiques have had elements Photoshopped out of them.

Powerlines are a favorite, but cars, people, houses, whole sections of the image have also been eliminated and replaced. Some folks do this well, aware of the subtle repetitive visual motifs that can be introduced by cloning, others less so.

Either way, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for such changes. Sometimes it’s felt necessary to rescue a poorly posed photograph, and sometimes it does indeed rescue the image, but a little more forethought in the original capture would be more satisfying. Sometimes it’s done for some sense of aesthetics, removing a distracting component. Again, there are situations where this is warranted. But personally I prefer to keep all that I originally saw in the photograph, striving, instead, to get a satisfying composition as I take the picture.

Using film is a great aid to this type of process. It has a couple of consequences, one more subtle than the other. Firstly, by virtue of the limit on alternate captures of the same scene that film forces on you (simply by only having a limited number of exposures per roll), you need to pay a lot more attention to getting the composition right in the first place. Secondly, by imprinting whatever is captured on a physical artifact, a film negative, the elements of that original scene take on a weightiness that seems absent when dealing with purely digital images. This second quality is ultimately more psychological than anything else, but that does not serve to diminish it.

Thus I have abandoned my prior habit of cloning out power lines or stray overhanging branches. I keep them in. What’s more, I now strive to make them a more significant component, such as in the above photograph of a Lebanon warehouse and elevator. Here the criss-crossing lines accent the strong lines of the buildings, forming a pleasing geometrical counterpoint that would be lost if I simply washed them out. The result is stronger and more real – inasmuch as any photograph can be real – and consequently more engaging.

 

Power Lines

Tags

cables, digital, film, image alteration, light, photography, photoshop, power lines, pylons, reality, ways of seeing

I can’t say I’m completely immune because I usually clean up my scans of film negatives to remove dust, hair and scratches using Photoshop, but there is something about an image caught on film that argues against altering the photograph.

Perhaps it’s the subliminal knowledge that the picture as captured by light and chemicals remains a relatively faithful representation of what came through my camera’s lens. Something that works against a permission to change. Today, many digital images captured in-camera have been run through the camera’s own embedded image processing software, straightening lines and removing vignetting to compensate for lens aberrations, altering color balances and applying sharpening. A whole pantheon of tweaks designed to produce a more pleasing result but one that is just that little bit further removed from the original.

Whatever, it’s become clear that cleaning up an image to remove elements that displease has become habitual for many. As revealed in my photo club critiques, the occasional photography exhibition scandal, and the perhaps futile exhortations of news organizations for unaltered images. Reuters will only accept in-camera jpgs now, rejecting the common technique of generating a jpg from a tweaked RAW original file. Even this is only half a solution, given rapidly expanding in-camera image manipulation capabilities.

Image alteration is not new. It’s been done since the earliest days of photography. Direct drawing on negatives, dodging, burning, and superimposing negatives on prints, these and many more techniques produced images quite different from what was originally captured. It’s a fallacy to believe that ‘Photoshopping’ began with Photoshop.

Nonetheless, the ease with which Photoshop and other image processing programs can alter images attracts use. It’s become common, and as is so often true of things that become conventional, it has become practically de rigeur to alter your digital images. Even if only to clean up those pesky sensor dust spots. Few things spark as much comment in my photo club critiques as an unaddressed dust spot in a bright blue sky. True, they are unsightly and certainly they are an artifact of the camera and not of the light that enters it, but they also represent a certain state of reality that transcends what is actually photographed and embraces the equipment used. I could say the same about dust, hairs and scratches on my film negatives. But I, like many others, do remove digital sensor dust spots just as I clean up my negative scans. I justify this by claiming that what I am repairing are defects introduced that interfere with the truth of the image I have collected. However, it’s impossible to refute the counterargument that my efforts make no positive difference to the truth of the image, rather they add a guessed component – guessed as defined by the computer algorithm that generates the result of, say, Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool – to the image. All the addition of this guessed component does is to make the image more harmoniously pleasing.

So what, you might ask. What difference does it really make? On the surface very little. But the simple fact that I am analyzing this process, questioning its ubiquity and value, has moved me away from a desire to change things more than absolutely necessary. I’ve stopped using lens correction software. I’ve stopped clone-stamping out those power lines that sometimes cross my skyline. I’ve stopped cloning out any detail that was originally there, but, by its lack of harmony with the original composition, screams out for removal. It’s neither correct nor incorrect to do this; it simply represents an aesthetic choice. One that feels right to me.

One that has turned me around so much that I now embrace those hitherto disdained power lines. Seek them out and marvel at their geometry and their transformation of the real world. They are beautiful.