Ernest Haas is one of my favorite photographers of old. He died fairly recently, in 1986. I’ve written about him before, but here are a couple of things he said that I particularly like:
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”
“A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?”
“Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.”
This last quote is most interesting to me, and perhaps to anyone who has been processing their own digital photography. There were far fewer people processing their own photos when we all used film, but now that we have a Lightroom instead of a Darkroom, it is easier and more mainstream to process everything yourself. That said, I think there are some digital photographers who are out in the field and send their files back to their assistant to do batch processing. Some of these that I know of are wildlife photographers. They want as many of their photos to be processed the same way as possible. It’s faster to do a batch process and do them all the same. If you’re doing that, or even doing a batch process yourself, you know it’s faster and your photos come out looking similar each time. I don’t do this myself, because I like to spend a bit more time on my images, so I process them one at a time. I may have several different subjects on one memory card, and I don’t want to process them identically. Plus, I like to do some “spot checking” on my images.
Sometimes I don’t catch all the eye grabbers right away, but I find them later and make corrections at that time. The photo that accompanies this post is one example. The first time through, I processed it as more of a batch process, and then, when I looked at it later, I saw some things that I thought were visually distracting and I removed them. Just FYI, I use Lightroom almost exclusively and I never have gotten into Photoshop, but I’m finding that Lightroom is pretty good and getting better all the time at taking things out of my images that I don’t like. I got the newest version of Lightroom installed, and noticed that many things changed, but I was able to figure out how to remove eye grabbers with a little trial and error.
I like this image, and I think the tulips are beautiful. I certainly can’t take credit for that. That’s God’s work. The late morning light highlighted the petals and gave them a glow. These are the types of things I rarely noticed before getting into photography, now I notice how light is shining on things all the time. In a sense, I “follow the light” as some photographers are fond of saying, and it helps guide me to my next subject. I’ve also learned what time of day is best for shooting various objects. Flowers, as an example, come out best if shot at midday in my opinion, unless you can find one that is translucent enough to see through in the late afternoon or early morning. For this shoot, in which I was concentrating on local spring blooms, I got started mid-morning, and was finished a little after noon.
These tulips were in a garden bed in downtown Grand Junction and the background was of a brick planter. When I first processed this image, the background came out lighter, and the brick pattern could be seen. There was also a stray plant leaf in the foreground of the image, which I found distracting. So, I used Lightroom to eliminate that leaf, and I think it made the image much cleaner. Then, I darkened the shadow area, which gave me more of a look of a solid black background. It eliminated the brick pattern. This focuses your attention on just the flowers. Using Lightroom to do this, I didn’t need to do any masking. I then used the spot remover to remove a few small grains of pollen that were visible on the outside of the flower petals. In this way, I did what Ernest Haas was speaking of, which is, I transformed the image into something that grabs your attention and eliminates the distracting background. Also, the saturation has been increased from the original image.
When I first got into digital photography, my plan was to create images that were beautiful, but not considered “highly processed.” I wanted a natural look above all. I still am inclined towards this, but I have also found that I like re-touching the images to increase their beauty. I shoot in raw, and so my original images are quite flat before processing. Much like in film photography, a negative was much flatter than a print. Everyone sees things a little differently, and I want to make images that appeal to my own sensibilities. I certainly have no ethical qualms about this. Lightroom does some good basic processing, but Photoshop does much more transformational work, and so far, I simply haven’t been interested in going that way. I may change my mind one day.
Back to the Haas quotations, I think what he’s saying in all these quotes, is highly metaphysical in nature. My photographic limitations are most definitely of my own making, as are most of the limitations I encounter in my life generally. By choosing to avoid Photoshop and stick with Lightroom for processing, I introduce some inherent limitations to what I do. It’s certainly interesting to consider this when feeling limited in our lives. If we’re feeling stuck in any area of our lives, it may be worthwhile to go through and see if we’re harboring limiting thoughts or ways of doing things that we could just as easily knock down and do differently if we wanted to. Just a thought.
Most importantly, just as we notice beauty in the world at large, we must consider that we see what is inside of us. When we look for beauty wherever we are, we usually find it. I’ve found this to be true even in some of the most unattractive areas: deserts littered with garbage, hillsides worn down from motorcycles and ATV riding in an otherwise pristine area, and old city streets covered with graffiti. It’s a reminder that we can find beauty anywhere, much like we can narrow the focus on our camera lens to show only the thing we find beautiful.
Adventures on Earth and Beyond 