I used to be happy when I took a photo that looked like what I saw in real life. There is skill in knowing how to use a camera so that the lighting, perspectives and colours are ‘right’. I’m getting better at doing this but I still need to take two, three, four or more photos of the one scene before I am satisfied.
Increasingly, I am interested in creating photos that reflect not the reality I see but an image I have in my mind. It seems to me that photography stops being a memory capture process and becomes ‘art’ when you start heavily post-processing.
I kept about 120 photos from my Yorkshire holiday. Of those 120, there are surprisingly few that I am happy with. Yorkshire at this time of year can be a dreary, grey sort of place. Late last night, I experimented a little on the computer. This is what I came up with.
I just couldn’t take a photo of this scene (Whitby Abbey) with a wide enough contrast. Either the ruins and gravestones were too dark or the sky was bleached out. Using the computer, I was able to boost the fill light and contrast, as well as crop out the empty space. One day, I will get a wider angle lens so that I can make real panoramas.
It was a beautiful sight as we rounded the corner, jumped a gate and realised how wide the River Tees was. My photos of the scene were dull and ordinary, probably because it was a dull and ordinary day. Once again, I didn’t have a wide enough lens to convey the vastness.
On the computer, there was nothing I could do to make this a panorama shot but at least the colour filter allowed me to create an interesting picture. It looks a little like an old-fashioned painting. If I could recompose the photo with my camera, I would have included a bit more grass at the bottom. Unfortunately, this composition suffers a little from the feeling that the observer is about to topple off the cliff.
This photo modification made me the happiest of Joans! The doctored photo was what I had in mind when I took the original (near Steel Rigg, Hadrian’s Wall). Imagine my disappointment at how washed out the colours were! In fact, the original is a pretty good reflection of reality. Reality, in this case, was just not good enough.
Finally, just to prove that I am not completely dependent on post-processing, this photo of York Minster Chapter House is all camera work. Of course, I had to take about eight photos to get this one.
I think the first photo had too poor contrast to be saved. To me, the adjusted image looks almost like 16-bit colour.
The others are fantastic, both the originals and the modified versions. I wish I had your skills.
I agree with your, Rohan, about the first photo. There is a technique called HDR that would have helped but I’m not sophisticated enough to use it. Check out the HDR Flickr group.
As for my ‘skills’, I used Google’s Picasa software, which is image processing for monkeys. It’s so easy and improved in later versions. It used to absolutly destroy the image quality when you edited a photo.
I also use Gimp, which is more fiddly. I haven’t made use of its extra power. All I do, really, is adjust colours.
Actually, the originals probably aren’t any closer to reality than the modified ones anyway. Cameras are generally less sensitive to light and colour than our eyes, which is why photos never look the same as the real thing.
I don’t think photography is about capturing reality — I think it’s more like putting a memory onto paper.