Commentary # 9 ~ October 2007
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Just Like CrackerJacks - What's in the Bottom of that New Camera's Box

October 2007


- by Craig Wassel

. . . An excited consumer anxiously opens his/her new camera's box and starts unpacking it's contents. Packing material - expected. Now the camera - a shiny thing of beauty. Then the accessories - we'll find out what these funny looking little things do later. Fliers and subscription offers for his/her 297 favorite magazines - they'll probably go straight to the recycle bin. The owner's manual - better keep that just in case it's needed . . .

. . . Oh . . . what this? Why, it's a CD, and it says "FotoMaestro PicturePerfecter" on it. This sounds very cool, we should load this immediately.

Yes, inside nearly every new camera box is an entry level image editor. It's nice - and amazing - that they are included with most cameras, because there is an awful lot that can be done with even the watered down versions of well known image editors. Example: Adobe Photoshop Elements is one of the more common, popular, and powerful editors found in those boxes. It does probably eighty percent of what the full program (Adobe Photoshop) does, which is probably 90% of what most will ever need. Removing red-eye, cropping, resizing, lightening, darking, color processing - it's all there.

Just like I don't go off on rants about the evils of digital, I won't indulge in some diatribe that suggests image editors are ruining photography.

But . . . . . . I do think they have the potential to ruin some potential photographers.

The danger, I think, is that it's tempting to treat the software in the bottom of the camera box like a toy suprise, and to use it to "fix" every image. It's a slippery slope, because the potential photographer can go from concentrating on the best possible composition at the time of exposure to thinking "I'll just fix it later". I can see strong evidence of this thinking in how often I'm asked how add, remove, or drastically alter things with PhotoShop; many seem to view it and software like it as a "photo fixer" rather than a digital darkroom.

If you read acclaimed photographer John Sexton's books about darkroom and printing, you will quickly learn the extraordinary amount of time he puts into preparing a print. Just one print. You will be stunned when you read how often he feels his prints fall short of his standards, and then fall straight into his trash without anyone but himself ever seeing them. Professional photographers working in the digital medium are doing much of the same in their "digital" darkrooms. If you see them spending large amounts of time working on one photograph, it's not because they think they can fix it or transform it into something great. It's because they captured something beyond the ordinary with the camera, and have decided it's worthy of preparing for the best possible print.

So what is there to spend hours on preparing for print if we are not fixing something, removing something, or adding something that was not there in the first place? Most of the work is born out of trying to communicate as powerfully as possible the subject in the photograph.

It begins with cropping: One of the toughest photographic temptations to resist is trying to fit "everything" into the viewfinder before releasing the shutter. That is fine for vacation pictures. For many other types of photography, though, it's the quickest way to create non-captivating photograph. The viewer's eye and brain searches to learn what a photograph is about, and leaving in everything distracts the viewer and takes away from the subject. If you don't believe me, try this exersize in taking and making a photojournalistic portrait: Take your subject outside for the photograph, and include much of he surroundings. Once you have your image up on screen, zoom in on your subject and do some aggressive cropping. Remove as much of those surroundings as you can AND cut off part of the top of your subject's head and maybe even an ear or limb. How did it feel cutting off part of your subject's head? If it was very uncomfortable, you probably started your photographic journey fairly recently - and there is nothing wrong with that. We all start somewhere. However, most viewers will find the cropped portrait far more interesting and appealing (see the example to the right). If you performed your surgery without getting squemish, you have probably been on your journey for at least a bit longer. There have been countless times where I have spent 20 minutes or more carefully considering where to crop to achieve the most simple photograph, while at the same time saying the most I can about the subject. It is remarkably difficult to make a "simple" yet captivating photograph.

Exposure is another critical detail in both the chemical and digital darkroom. The incredible human eye can see around 14 levels of light simultaneously. The very best film and film cameras cannot quite record this range from brightness to darkness known as "dynamic range". Although digital cameras are improving rapidly, they deliver even a little less dynamic range than film. This makes it an even greater challenge to make a digital photograph that has good detail in both shadows and in highlights. Many accomplished photographers do not like digital because it is so easy to lose ("blow out") detail in highlighted areas of the image, and this is particularly true with digital black & white photography. There are ways to maintain both maximum highlight and shadow details in the digital medium, but it requires this understanding of how digital sensors react to light, and extra care and work at the time of exposure and in the digital darkroom. A photographer may spend a great deal of time working on shadow and highlight details, and/or use "dodging" and "burning" techniques to achieve balance. The same thing has been done in chemical darkrooms for years, and the goal is to preserve detail, balance exposure, get closer to what the human eye sees, and flatter the subject. The goal is not to completely alter the substance of what was in front of the lens via addition or subtraction.

Cropping and exposure are just two areas of attention in the digital darkroom, that are similar to the chemical darkroom, and that are used to ready a photograph for presenting and/or printing. There are many others, and there are great books devoted entirely to these topics. But what I am driving at is the two different ways we can think of and use the likes of Photoshop. If you glance back through this commentary, you will see that I stopped using the term "image editor" early - back in the fourth paragraph. That was very intentional, and it is because of the way I think about and use (in my case) Photoshop in my workflow: it is part of my digital darkroom, not my "photo fixer" or my toy suprise in the bottom of a CrackerJacks box.

When I am deciding whether or not to photograph a subject, I am thinking about whether the reflective and ambient light is effective enough to be worthwhile. I am thinking about whether I can keep enough distracting elements out of the photograph to emphasize my subject. I am thinking about good exposure. I am choosing depth of field and focal length and watching my shutter speed. I am deciding whether color helps tell something significant about the subject, or whether it gets in the way and that black and white better suits. I am deciding what moves me. If I'm not attending to these details while shooting and instead depending on PhotoShop to "fix" things later, I know I am going to have many disappointments when reviewing my shots later.

The digital medium undoubtedly offers creative opportunities less easily achievable in the chemical darkroom. It's possible to add things that were not there, take away things that were, and that is pure magic for someone like a graphic designer. But my passion is taking my camera everywhere I can and making photographs by showing things to the lens. All we have to work with is what is right in front of us at a given moment.

That's part of the challenge, and part of what makes it an adventure. Our magic is when we catch something special happening in front of the lens. Those are gifts presented to us to show to our lens, and are the real, true suprises waiting for us with our photography.

"As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs."

~ Sam Abell ~








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- uncropped


" . . . I do think they have the potential to ruin some potential photographers. The danger, I think, is that it's tempting to treat the software in the bottom of the camera box like a toy suprise, and to use it to "fix" every image. It's a slippery slope, because the potential photographer can go from concentrating on the best possible composition at the time of exposure to thinking "I'll just fix it later". I can see strong evidence of this thinking in how often I am asked how add, remove, or drastically alter things with PhotoShop; many seem to view it and software like it as a "photo fixer" rather than a digital darkroom . . . "



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