What My Lens Has Taught Me

This is sort of a response to a post at Kev­in’s blog about pho­tog­ra­phy and dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion. I fig­ured my activ­i­ty on my own site has been a trick­le late­ly, so I’d just post here instead of just leav­ing him a lengthy response. If you aren’t already read­ing Kevin and Katie’s blog, you should be.

When I close my eyes and think about the peo­ple I know, I don’t see any blem­ish­es on their faces or that they prob­a­bly should­n’t be wear­ing that t‑shirt in pub­lic. When I pic­ture my home in my head, I don’t think about the fact that the brick needs some re-point­ing or that the yard looks like crap right now1. If I recall some of the amaz­ing things I’ve seen on some of our trav­els, I don’t think about the sun glare that was in my eyes on Oahu’s beach­es or the grime on a win­dow I was look­ing out at the top of the Eif­fel Tow­er. There are mem­o­ries that that will be with me for­ev­er because of how impor­tant they are and how hap­py they make me.

I also have the pho­tographs to prove that my mind deletes quite a bit out of the pic­tures. My hair looks like I’m in a tor­na­do in every pho­to I’d actu­al­ly like to hang up on the wall. There are ugly road signs all over Hawai’i. I can nev­er get close enough to some­thing to keep the detail while actu­al­ly being able to frame a shot that I’d like. The list of stuff my brain deletes in a mem­o­ry is even longer than the list of my short­com­ings as a photographer.

I under­stand Kev­in’s feel­ing of shame and guilt over dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion of pho­tos. To that point, I have a unma­nip­u­lat­ed copy of every­thing I’ve ever changed, just in case some­one ever asks for proof that I did­n’t fab­ri­cate the entire scene with minia­tures in my base­ment and Pho­to­shop. In my job as a struc­tur­al engi­neer, I take pho­tos to doc­u­ment con­struc­tion all the time. There is lit­tle art in them as they rep­re­sent the bare facts of obser­va­tion. They are pure, clunky state­ments of fact with no visu­al prose or embellishments.

How­ev­er, I real­ly enjoy (at least the attempt at) tak­ing more artis­tic and expres­sive pho­tos. There’s some­thing so con­strict­ing about a still pho­to that makes it more than just a visu­al record. Our mind focus­es on the item and fills in blanks while delet­ing extra data. Pho­tog­ra­phy does­n’t do that for us. To cap­ture the feel­ing of what you see requires so much more than just point­ing and shoot­ing, I have learned. The human eye, when view­ing some­thing first hand, is a dynam­ic device that has the abil­i­ty to rapid­ly change focus and aper­ture to craft togeth­er a mem­o­ry that is so much more than a sta­t­ic pho­to. To cap­ture that in a pho­to, one has to put a great deal of thought into the shot.

How­ev­er, some­times, that’s just not enough. Some­times the best angle still has some obstruc­tion, poor light­ing, or such vari­able light as to make the raw pho­to less than ide­al. That’s where some dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion can add to the pho­to. The final image for pos­ter­i­ty can be more than just the poor­ly exposed bits of data we first see. We can bring into it more con­trast, edit out extra­ne­ous obstruc­tions, or crop it to change the sub­ject focus all togeth­er. The abil­i­ty to do this isn’t some­thing that should be used all the time, but can make for us both art as well as a more accu­rate por­tray­al of the mem­o­ry rather than the stark image cap­tured on a dig­i­tal sen­sor. It expos­es the soul of the view as some­thing more than just a still photo.

1. Actu­al­ly, that was true when I start­ed this arti­cle, but just today I mowed the lawn and had a friend over to work on some mason­ry repairs. It actu­al­ly looks pic­ture per­fect, in my opin­ion. [↩]