I had a sudden trip to Boston that I needed to work into my schedule, which meant I had to get up early, vote, go to the post office, and then drive fast and furious down to Washington airport to get the 6:00pm Jetblue flight northbound.
As it happened, the flight was 3 hours late, so I had plenty of time. I spend a lot of time “in transit” and I usually let my mind wander; most of the postings in this blog are amalgamations of some form of mind wandering or other.
It was a strangely beautiful day. There was a bit of frost in the morning, which filled the air with the slightest amount of mist and that broke the sunlight into shafts of clean soft brightness against the fall colors.
When humans see a photograph and find it striking it seems as though some people look for contrast first, then color while others look for color, then contrast. That’s one reason (I believe) why ‘rules’ of composition and photography are B.S.: the catalogue of “photography that does not suck” is a mix of something for everyone. There are no objective rules at all, it’s all personal.
I find this image funny because I was actually thinking of the beautiful fall colors of the mountains, but firing the camera straight at the sun, I knew, would create a high contrast situation where the trees by the road would look very dark. Cameras only record a limited dynamic range, unlike our eyes – which is why some conspiracy theorists think the moon photos are fake: “where are the stars?” Simple: the film’s dynamic range wasn’t wide enough to record them because the scene was very contrasty. If the camera had been exposing for the star-field it would have recorded it just fine, but the astronauts would have been completely blown out.
This photo also amuses me because I know that with a tiny bit of photoshopping, it could look very sinister indeed. Hollywood photographers realized a while ago that you could do nighttime scenes just fine by shooting in daylight and compensating for the exposure – adjusting for the tonal range at filming time using a blue filter to simulate the kind of visual tone-stretch our eyes can get when they look into shadows (which are full of blue light) – our eyes cheat, they’re multi-modal cameras that record detail in the highlights (rods) and shadows (cones) separately; our brains mash it all together and give us the illusion of a continuous tonal range where one does not really exist.
It’s also fascinating to me how our expectations of vintage technology affect our understanding of current technology. When you see an image that has vignetting, for example, that’s a modern technique of simulating the lens “fall off” from great big vintage lenses in the day when we shot wet plates that were about 5ASA in terms of film speed. The “wide open portrait lens” look favored by Hurrell and other Hollywood photographers was also a look the resulted from slow film speed (around 100ASA) that was popular at the time, and the smooth grainless look was a result of big negatives not small grains. The biggest of these conventions is, of course, black and white. Black and white photography was an accident of history not an aesthetic choice: photos were black and white because commercially practical color photography had not been invented yet. But we still find black and white modes on modern digital cameras – I use Hipstamatic a lot on my supercomputer-powered iPhone 6, and I get endless amusement out of how it simulates poor depth of field and low speed film with big grain. My fancy Canon 5D mostly sits in its bag, forlorn and unloved. The pictures it produces are a lot of data and it takes a great deal of time and attention to retouch them, but if I just bang something out with Hipstamatic I can forgive myself for flaws in the image, which means I do a lot more photography.
I forget the model number but a few years ago I was at a show and Bob Blakley was running around with a digital camera by Pentax (I think it was) that had all the retro looks and styling of a vintage 1960s 35mm camera – except it had an LCD panel on the back that you could use in addition to the viewfinder. The camera had a bunch of “old film modes” which were rendered in real-time in the LCD panel; using the camera and looking at the LCD was like looking back into the 1950s, the film emulation was very good. All of this amounts to “making a really great camera deliberately emulate a fairly bad one.”
Back in the day when I was shooting wet plate/ambrotypes, I used to get people all the time asking me how I got that effect in Photoshop – was there an action pack that they could use to get a similar look, with the crazy borders and creamy tones? I finally scanned a few plates and posted high resolution versions of the edges to a few stock photo sites. I sometimes stumble across my plate-edges in book illustrations or covers – using supercomputers and massive amounts of memory to simulate a very primitive process that nobody in their right mind wants to mess with any more.
When humans see a photograph and find it striking it seems as though some people look for contrast first, then color while others look for color, then contrast.
I must be very unusual. The first thing I look for in photographs is naked women.
That difference between how a camera “sees” light and how a human sees light is the reason I paint… I just could never get the colors right in my photos, although it’s true I was not using Photoshop.
I do love black and whites. There are times when the color is a distraction from the form and the light. As a child growing up we nearly always had a darkroom in the house (scientist parent; needed for work) and I learned how to run the darkroom and print photos from the negatives.
It’s interesting how your photos have a very distinctive look to them, no matter the equipment you are using. You seem to have a strong clear vision of how to do photos that really translates to any equipment.
While you were out:
Someone plans to make a diamond ring. No really, a ring made from diamond
our brains mash it all together and give us the illusion of a continuous tonal range where one does not really exist.
Where does that not exist? Is not the electromagnetic spectrum continuous, including the small slice of it that excites our photoreceptors?
Reginald Selkirk @#1
You aren’t unusual. Naked women are the second thing I look for in art. The first thing is naked men (I have a bit of preference for guys).
kestrel @#2
In my opinion, manipulating colors in Photoshop is a lot simpler than painting a picture from scratch.
Also, since you said you make paintings, do you have an online gallery? Mine is here— https://www.deviantart.com/avestra/gallery/. If there are also other artists among the Commentariat, then I’m curious.
By the way, one of the things that fascinate me about art is how you can use one technique to mimic the look of another one. It’s possible to digitally photoshop a photo to make it look like a drawing or a painting. It’s also possible to draw a picture that looks like a photo. For example, this guy http://www.gordonhanley.com.au/GoldDrawings/gold.html creates drawings which look just like black and white photographs. And he’s not even using graphite, he uses the silverpoint drawing technique instead. (By the way, specially for Marcus, take a look at his drawings of nude women, found here http://www.gordonhanley.com.au/GoldDrawings/portraits.html, his drawings really remind me of your photography style, thus I suspect you might like them. Incidentally, this guy is the reason why I decided to learn the metalpoint technique, his skill level is incredible.)
Yes and no. On the one hand, people’s tastes certainly differ a lot when it comes to what we perceive as beautiful. On the other hand, it cannot be completely personal either—often our tastes align and we are capable of agreeing that some artwork really is beautiful. It our tastes didn’t overlap at all, there could be no famous and almost universally beloved artists. How comes that so many people can agree that Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings are beautiful? Apparently, he knew how to create images liked by many.
I do agree that rules about how to make “photography that does not suck” are near useless for various reasons. Let’s begin with the fact that they aren’t universally applicable. What kind of composition looks good is going to depend upon the subject matter (thus you cannot possibly use the rule of thirds for every image). Moreover, whenever people have tried to establish some “rule” for how to make good visual images, a bunch of rebellious artists always showed up and created something that looks absolutely amazing despite failing to confirm with that rule. Thus, for each rule, there are countless images that are beautiful despite breaking that rule.
It’s the exact opposite for me. I bought my first smartphone only a couple of years ago. Back then I put pieces of duct tape on both its cameras. I didn’t expect to use my phone’s camera at all. After a while, it turned out that having a camera on a smartphone can actually be useful—when I’m in a train station, I can take a photo of the train timetable and thus save myself the few seconds it takes to write notes; when I shop online and some item arrives damaged, I can quickly take a photo to send to the store’s customer service, etc. But I never use my smarphone’s camera for any photo that I actually care about.
When I’m expecting photography opportunities, I lug around my DSLR with its heavy lenses and, depending on what I’m planning to photograph, also a tripod or a speedlite. Your photo that illustrates this blog post is an example of a photo I would have never taken the way you did. If I felt like the scenery was beautiful enough to warrant photographing it, then I would have put my camera on a tripod and captured two different RAW exposures (one for the shadows, the other one for the sky). Afterwards, at home, I would merge both exposures in photoshop and spend about an hour tweaking the image. The way I see it, if some scene is beautiful enough to warrant photographing it, then it’s worth taking the time it takes to create a photo that’s as good as I can possibly make it. On the other hand, if I don’t care about some photo and don’t want to invest time into making it, then there’s also no point pulling out the smartphone from my pocket.
I know that my approach differs from that of other people. I often return home from a trip or a vacation without a single photo. I generally also avoid taking selfies with my friends (unless then ask me to). In my life, I have found out that I don’t care to look at old vacation photos or selfies with friends. The ones I have just sit on my hard drive in some obscure and forgotten folder that I haven’t opened for years. But I do like to periodically look at my best photos, the ones that I’m actually proud of. Thus I only take a photo when it seems to me like I can make it look good. I prefer not to let my friends take photos of me but I’m perfectly happy to pose for a skilled photographer. I also don’t take any photos with my smarthone, but I’m perfectly happy to lug around a heavy DSLR. This is even the case with my family’s pets (we have a bunch of dogs). I have no photos at all with some of the dogs, but with other dogs I have photos that took me a hell lot of effort to make (for example, I got this photo https://www.deviantart.com/avestra/art/Autumn-Leaves-II-649426648 after lying on the ground for two hours and getting totally frozen).
When I take photos, I try to make them as good as I can with my current skills. It’s OK if there are flaws in the image that another better photographer could have avoided. It’s OK if I capture some image that is just a worse version of something similar done in past by better photographers. It’s OK if my photos have flaws in them as long as I tried my best. The only thing I cannot forgive myself is intentional laziness and sloppiness. Thus I prefer to either put some effort into my art or to not make any art at all.
I perceive these things as useless. I’d rather have a high quality RAW file that I can later edit in photoshop, which gives me much more flexibility about how exactly I want the final image to look like.
Old photos do look beautiful, thus it makes sense to emulate the look.
By the way, exactly the same is happening also with paintings. I assume you have noticed that colors in old paintings are more dull and nowhere near as bright and vibrant as those in modern paintings. The reason is that many artists’ pigments were discovered only recently. A few centuries ago artists didn’t have access to pigments like phthalo green, quinacridone magenta, or synthetic ultramarine. Instead they were forced to use whatever inferior pigments were available. Thus old paintings are less vivid, their colors are less saturated. But the thing is, some modern painters choose to intentionally make their modern paints look less vivid than they could be. Just mix your phthalo green paint with something else that makes it look dull, and voilà—you now have paint that looks similar to what the old masters used. And the thing is, depending on what kind of look the artist wants to achieve, dull and non vivid colors may be a good thing. (Of course, just like you have been making ambrotypes, there are also plenty of artists who use the actual historical pigments and art materials. It can be done, since these pigments are available from a few specialty stores that cater to art restorers. However, some of the old pigments have serious flaws, for example, lead white is toxic and traces of hydrogen sulfide in the air may cause it to turn black, Alizarin Crimson isn’t lightfast, several historically used pigments make the paining surface crack over time. Thus mimicking the old look with modern pigments is often a better idea than using the real thing.)