It's About Feeling

I sense a wonderful thing, these days, in photo land. I sense that people are finally reaching the realisation that maybe good art cannot be bought by simply tacking on fancier tools. I see more discussion about aspects of image quality beyond mere megapixels and ISO. Good.

One of the things I love about film is that it is resolution independent. It is colour space independent. Heck, if we are talking about negative film even the ISO is somewhat flexible. And a proper film camera leaves you only worrying about the things that matter: your focus and your exposure.

I was trying to express what I like about analogue-sourced images when my eyes settled on this photograph. It is of a quiet hidden bay of a wild lake in southern Washington state. It is dark, quiet, peaceful. I look at the photograph and I can feel the surroundings. A digital capture of the same scene might be more technically accurate but it would fail to "put" me in the scene in the same way. To me, film images speak directly to the heart. Good ones do. And this is where a lot of people misunderstand photography.

When I started out in photography I started out like, I think, almost everybody else. The initial impression is that a photograph should express some kind of literal objective truth. It is only as one gets more involved in what choices one makes to achieve an image that one slowly learns that there is no such thing. After you learn that image making is a never-ending sequence of active choices you start developing the skill and hopefully confidence to make these choices deliberately with a certain goal in mind. Make no mistake, everyone makes these choices. If you are not aware of that then you are making the choices randomly or abdicating them to automatic processes somewhere along the line. That doesn't make your images more honest, just more random and unfocussed.

And what is the point of all of this? You are creating an image. It has the same goal as any other work of art. It should make you feel something!

Sunset On The Lake

I took a few shots on the lake last summer in Washington state. This one sticks with me.

There is not much to say about the technical aspects of the picture. Allowing the trees to fall in value to a near silhouette creates a graphical quality to the picture. Often, simplicity is a virtue in photographs.

Seeing What You Can't See

A shot like this is not something you will ever see at the time. Our brains and eyes don't see in terms of minutes and hours. We also cannot see at the time as much detail as the camera will pick up on a long exposure.

To achieve a picture like this you have to see it in your mind's eye before hand.

There are some tricks that you can use. Experience will help you to judge the things that will appear in a long exposure. For the stars you should be able to find the North Star or Southern Cross. The stars will spiral around this point and you can design the composition to feature this with a little forethought. This picture is also assisted by the leading lines from the tree trunks. Taking the picture with a very wide angle lens has helped to create the impression that all the trees are aimed at some distant point.

The technical details are not nearly as important.

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

There is an old truism about determining correct exposure. The exposure meters in most cameras will do an excellent job in most situations but there are certain scenes like a white cat on a snow bank or a black cat in a coal shed that the built-in exposure meter will be guaranteed to get wrong. This is because the camera cannot really understand what it is looking at.

When we start taking pictures we often lack the confidence to make our own decisions, especially when they contradict the recommendations of the camera. But it is only by making your own decisions that you will really start to take control of the images that you create.

Good Enough Isn't

Some images you will work harder on than others. Your better images are more important to get right because they are the ones that really have potential to affect people. Some images just don't have anything going for them. However much work you put into them you are essentially, as they say, polishing a turd. For the good ones, however, it can take a lot of work to get it close to where you think it should be. But it should always be as close as you can make it.

This can be quite a burden. Sometimes an image is taken as far as it can go and you later learn something which it suddenly occurs to you will let you take a certain image an important step forward. You return to the image and now you find that the only way to improve the image is to do all the work again this time incorporating whatever it is that you have learned. This is almost always considerably more work than whatever considerable work you already invested in the image. The temptation is just not to bother. It's good enough.

There is no "good enough" in art.

The above picture is now much closer to where it always should have been. It is my hope that I will always have the courage to return to images that need it.

Be Free

You can crop.

Don't feel obliged to leave in whole swaths of picture area that aren't doing anything. It's not always something you can avoid at shooting time (for instance if you have a fixed lens camera). Of course get it right at shooting time if you can but if you can't just crop.

The above is a one megapixel crop from a six megapixel image. More than enough to tell the story.

Sunset On Russian Hill San Francisco

Taken with a small 1950s tourist camera.