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.

The Ansel Adams Moves

I read a recent article on www.luminous-landscape.com by Alain Briot. He was arguing for greater artistic interpretation in "art" photographs, particularly landscape ones. He described such things as were possible in the darkroom and perfected in the work of Ansel Adams as the "Ansel Adams moves". He went on to cover local geometric distortion, cloning elements and selective colour shifting etcetera as the further alterations that were appropriate now that they are possible.

The gist of his article was that we are all living in the past and should not feel bound by what was done before. After all, what was done before was largely as much as could be done within the scope of the tools available. And, of course, Alain Briot is an artist and does (unlike many luminous-landscape writers) have some attractive and impressive work to back up his words with. Still, it got me thinking if he was right.

I'm not so sure. I feel quite an affinity for the so-called Ansel Adams moves. I feel that art gets power from certain limitations. Is a six string bass always better than a four? Is a synthesizer better than an electric guitar because it can span more notes and make more different sounds? I would say not always, maybe even not often.

Photography is not painting. It defines itself ultimately through the concept of seeing the world through some lens or other. There is a certain implication in a photograph that the picture is related in some fairly simple way to the actual light rays that came in through the lens and formed it. We are happy for a guitar to be distorted, for instance, but not for one of the strings to sound like a piano and the next string like a harp.

The above is a recent picture of mine. It probably has the most "processing" done on it of any photograph I have taken recently. However, they are all "Ansel Adams" moves. It is my hope that the picture still looks natural. As Ansel Adams himself says, once the work that is done on a photograph reaches a level where it is obvious it looses all its power.

Show Me Some Skin

Human skin.

I think it is the most difficult thing to get looking truly natural.

We, as people, are just so highly attuned to what it should look like. We know what colour it should be and we are very highly attuned to any distortion of that colour or any colour casts across the range of tones on the skin. We also know what texture it should be. For us it is a key indicator of health what a person's skin looks like. Sloppy retouching can give a plastic sheen to skin that leaves a person looking ill or even simply unreal.

This is a large format portrait I took a while back of Sarah, who is both beautiful and awesome to work with. I am constrained, currently, by having to work with a rather cheap and cheerful scanner for my large format work. It is difficult, therefore, to get a good scan that preserves all the nuances of tone. As a result I struggled with this particular image for several days. The other versions were not terrible but they were all let down by poor skin tone (colour, texture or both).

I think I've cracked it with this version.

Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Just Shoot!

The scene: Amazing sunset

The problem: Crummy unclean hotel window in the way

The solution: Choose a largish aperture and shield lens with hand