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Posts tagged ‘longform’

Musings on: absence of the ‘right’ weather

It’s too sunny today. Last week, it was too murky. Recently, several times, it’s been too rainy. Why is it that – and I’m pretty sure it’s not just me – landscape photographers are so often unhappy, or at least discontented with the weather conditions?

On numerous occasions recently, mostly when I’ve arranged to meet with someone to take photographs, I have found myself complaining, either internally or out loud, about the nature of the weather. Arguably, I’ve focused on bemoaning the quality of the light, rather than the weather itself, but it all comes down to the weather really. One of the features of Great Britain is that the weather is more than a little variable; not in the long term – it can’t reasonably be said to ever be really hot, or really cold (though it tried hard last winter, with a nippy minus 20C near my house), and compared to many places it barely ever precipitates in any genuinely major manner – but in the short term it varies enormously. The result of this is that planning for photography – or pretty much anything else involving being outdoors, come to that – is not as easy as it might be were the weather more predictable.

One day not terribly long ago, I experienced snow, rain and sleet during just one day! I feel entirely justified in complaining about this since it’s unpleasant to be out in, but I may have been compounding my disappointment with the weather’s pleasantness, or otherwise, with additional gripes related to it being ‘not right for photography‘ for a whole series of different reasons. From my sample of half a dozen people, I’m not alone in this manner of thinking.

At the moment, for example, the sun is shining in a clear, blue, near-cloud-free sky; lovely (it really is, better than most summer days in North Yorkshire in recent years). Except that it isn’t what I want to photograph. Everything is totally bleached out, and when the sun heads towards the horizon nothing interesting is going to happen – at least, I suspect as much because today is very much like yesterday (in contradiction to the earlier complaint, of course – you see, not even the variability is consistent!).

What I want to photograph is ‘dramatic light’. I’ve been making images in haze, mist, fog and light rain for several weeks now and I need a change. The trouble with that is that ‘dramatic light’ tends to equate to storms, which in turn are usually characterised by high winds (tripod blowing around – not good) and water in various forms falling out of the sky (uncomfortable and leading to frequent lens-cleaning – also not desirable).

So, if the weather was doing what I want photographically, and providing the much-sought-after ‘dramatic light’, I could still moan about it. This is emphatically not a useful or constructive attitude! A change has to be made, and that’s what prompted me to start writing this musing.

It’s too late to ‘save’ today – I have no real idea of what I can photograph effectively on days like this – but what I’m going to do instead is pore over maps, think about places I’ve been, or intend to go, and work out what type of weather I would ideally like to photograph them in. More precisely, I’m going to produce a table showing weather conditions – I have yet to work out how granular this will be, but ‘clear, blue sky / rain / mist / snow’ is a minimal starting point – and then list every location I can think of against each of these. In practice, I shall probably do this in reverse: start off with locations, work out what sort of weather they’d suit, then tabulate it, determine where the gaps in my little table are, and attempt to fill them in.

Assuming that a) I do this, b) I can think of at least one location for each weather condition, c) I actually remember I’ve done it and use the table, I should be able to find somewhere to go in future, whatever the weather, without wasting all of the time I’d put aside for photography working out where I should be and what I should be pointing the camera at. Put another way, it may help me to avoid the far too common pattern wherein prevarication leads to my not getting out at all as I’ve run out of time…

To get to the point of this post: with the help of this location planning, I am intending to work on the basis, from now on, that there is no such thing as bad weather, in terms of photographs. Instead, I shall work with there are bad combinations of weather and location which can make finding a composition unnecessarily difficult if it’s not been thought of in advance. And I shall have thought of these things in advance!

I shall cite an image I made recently as an example of that hypothesis – it’s not a proof, just an example. ‘Forceful mist’ was made on a bright, sunny day, and that’s precisely why the location worked, being hidden in a deep, shadowy gorge, but with the water lit by the high levels of ambient light.

'Forceful mist'

So, I have a possible solution to enable me to take photographs in virtually any conditions now, provided that I manage to make the table. The trouble is, other than when it’s snowy – I like snow – I shall still be able to complain about the weather.

Musings on: the ethics of digital manipulation (post-processing!)

(Just a note for clarity: I’m talking below about landscape photography only; there are obviously somewhat wider-ranging ethical considerations in journalism and several other types of photography.)

I’ve read several discussions recently about the ethics surrounding manipulating digital files, whether those produced by a digital camera, or those scanned from an exposed film. I’ve found them all very interesting, but also more than a little bemusing. Essentially: why are people bothered by what others do whilst creating their own work?

That’s a slightly disingenuous question. I have a moderate understanding of the various reasons people object; I’m just unconvinced by the arguments. The most common may be summarised as follows:

It’s cheating. This is very much the idea that photographs should show reality, accurately, and nothing more or less.
It’s deceiving. Similar to the above, but with the suggestion that the photographer has deliberately misrepresented reality to the viewer; an additional misdemeanour to that of altering it in the first place.
It’s not what the ‘master photographers’ have done in the past. The weakest argument, since they very much did, just not digitally.
It should all be done in-camera. This one is simply an argument related to how a goal is achieved, and falls more into the realm of an individual photographer’s personal choices of working method than anything else. It does not, after all, relate to the finished image more than incidentally.

I don’t accept any of these objections, at least not in the context of landscape photography. Rather, I do accept them, and if people viewing photographs want to hold those views, that’s fine (with the possible exception of the second one on deception) but they’re purely personal and shouldn’t enter the realm of telling other photographers how to go about their photography. They also make no difference to the finished image, which means that I, as the viewer, don’t really care how it was made when viewing it as a piece of art, though I may well be interested to know how it was done in order to further my photographic learning process!

I’ll address each in turn.

1. ‘Cheating’. This is predicated on the assumption that a photograph is nothing more than a depiction of something in the real world. Whilst this may be true for certain types of image – accurate renditions of architecture for commercial reasons, perhaps – it’s no more than an assumption, and one which really doesn’t have to apply to landscapes. There is no intrinsic reason not to endeavour to faithfully reproduce a scene, but then, nor is there any reason to do so – it comes down to what the photographer wishes to achieve. If we make the additional leap and consider a photographer to be an artist, then how a scene is portrayed really is entirely down to their intentions or aspirations. Personally, I tend towards making things look credible, but this is no better or worse than people who enjoy obviously unrealistic images. I also do consider photography to be art, which is a handy way of saying that ‘anything goes’.
2. ‘Deceiving’. This is a fair cop, but only if the photographer claims that they’ve not manipulated the image when, in fact, they have done so. I’ve noticed that some viewers will claim that they’ve been deceived when, in practice, they have simply seen an image and later learnt that it’s been ‘manipulated’. I’d argue that, for deception to occur, the photographer really needs to have said that the image is unaltered. It also indicates a misunderstanding of the nature of both film and digital photography, which I’ll come back to, but which is based on the unsurprising concept that a two dimensional image produced by numerous technical processes and then viewed as a print or on screen can never really be what was seen, or what was there.
3. ‘A break from the past’. Essentially, this is simply indicative of a lack of knowledge of the history of photography! Both black & white and colour photographs have always been manipulated. It was considerably more difficult to modify colour than black & white before digital imaging became available, but it was always part of the photographic process. I think this objection arises now since, using post-processing tools, people are able to make images which quite obviously don’t represent reality. Famously, Ansel Adams’ prints were very different in tonality to what was captured on the negative, as were/are those of many other ‘masters’. Adams himself, using a musical analogy, referred to the negative as the score and to the print as the performance. Looked at in this perspective, ‘interpretation’ is an entirely valid part of the artistic process which goes to make up the finished item, whether it’s a musical performance or a printed photograph.
4. ‘It should be done in camera’. Viewed as a finished piece of art, does it make any difference how an image was constructed? There are somewhat abstruse and esoteric arguments to say that it does, but in general most people would concede that the main point is the finished piece, and not how it was arrived at. Personally, I use neutral density graduated filters in preference to high dynamic range (HDR) techniques involving combining multiple exposures. So what? I happen to like to work that way; it’s not intrinsically better in some ethical way.

From another perspective – and this is something of a killer argument which addresses everything above except active deception – cameras, whether film or digital, do not record light in the way that the combination of our eyes and brains processes incoming light and enables us to perceive an image. It seems to me to be almost inevitable that the majority of captures will need some form of manipulation, even if the objective is to come as close as possible to ‘what I saw’. If I look at a scene with shadows in it, my eyes continually adjust both their focus and the aperture of the iris to enable me to see both highlight and shadow detail; cameras can’t do that (at least, not yet, and not without using multiple exposures to achieve it; and even then, it’s a static result, not the dynamic experience we perceive when we are viewing the scene in reality).

Beyond that, what is defined as ‘manipulation’? I happen to record RAW files; they contain just data, not a photograph in any meaningful sense. These data have to be converted into a usable image in a format capable of being displayed or printed, and in doing this conversion I am manipulating the photograph (through settings in the RAW converter) even before I do any dodging and burning of the image itself! Were I to record JPG images in the camera, I could copy them over to a computer and view them immediately, but then I’d have previously chosen the JPG settings in the camera, which is simply very-early-on manipulation of the finished image… After conversion, I lighten and darken areas of some photographs to control how the viewer’s eyes move around the image – equivalent to dodging and burning black & white prints. This is unequivocally manipulation, but I’m attempting to represent how I saw the scene to a third party, and the technique undoubtedly helps in that. Again, this is aiming to be art, so conveying how I felt, how I saw the composition, is part of that art.

In conclusion, I would find it bizarre if I were to learn that professional landscape photographers did not, at the very least, dodge and burn images before completing them. If we assume that photography is an art form, then surely the vision of the photographer should determine what may appropriately be done to the raw material in producing the finished picture?

Of course, all of the above is purely opinion. I’m not remotely saying that anyone’s view on the ethics – to be somewhat grandiose – of manipulation is right or wrong, merely expressing my take on it. Personally, I’m happy to dodge and burn, but have never yet cloned anything out, or in – and I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t do so; but that’s just my personal take on photographic ethics … I wouldn’t, however, deny that I’d ‘manipulated’ the image – what would be the point?!

What’s your view? I’d be interested to hear more comments and discussion on this.

Musings on: the usefulness of taking, and reviewing, ‘not-so-good’ images

The point of this item is to argue that all the relatively poor photographs I’ve taken since I took up photography have been very useful in helping me to make what I think are improved images, some of them at the same locations and of the very same scenes, that feature in the earlier, less successful ones.

I’ve recognised the above for a while now, but I was struck today, whilst browsing through some photos I took when I first started using a ‘proper’ camera, and also considering the thoughts I’ve had in writing the first few ‘making of’ posts here, by how useful to my development the many less-than-good images I’ve made have been. Thinking further, that’s still true: I (of course!) still make images that don’t work – though the ‘keeper’ ratio is improving slowly – and I still find reviewing what went wrong very useful. Pleasingly, however, the nature of the problems with them is changing over time.

Early on, I almost exclusively concentrated on drama of some kind: with very few exceptions, every image I still have from the first six months is either taken at a very wide angle or is of some extreme set of colours, whether naturally so or as a result of pumping up the saturation in post-processing. The typical wide-angle shot – something small in the foreground taking up a large part of the frame, combined with some inevitably distant scenery – is an easy way to exploit the equipment and produce an eye-catching image. It’s a perspective that most people not perpetually scanning through photo sites don’t generally see, so showing such images to friends and family is an easy win; they’re impressed with the extreme visual impact and oddness of the result. Somewhat similarly, pushing the sliders in post-processing to make a colourful scene even more so through saturation and contrast works in the same way. Early on, engendering exclamations from people you know is great, and such methods certainly achieve that.

Thirdly, and to some degree similarly to the previous two methods of producing drama, I found that I’d taken lots of shots using all sorts of things – mostly, but not exclusively, trees – to frame photographs. Some of these images even include bright sunsets and a wide-angle lens to produce the trinity of ‘easy win’ images. Maybe it’s just me, but, after a while, having something to produce a frame as part of the image becomes a little predictable.

Not that any of these techniques or subjects are, per se, bad, but they can be over-used; and I most certainly was over-using them! These are not necessarily bad photos then – many of mine may well have been, but the general styles aren’t intrinsically wrong. What they are is very repetitive. ‘Formulaic‘ is very possibly the most apposite word here; and the problem with a successful, visual formula is that, once it’s been seen numerous times, the differences start to be insignificant; one image blends into another. If you add to that the fact that I’d been taken in by the myth of the ‘rule of thirds’, which I seem to have followed rather rigorously early on, and my early collection of images is very much a series of minor variations around two or three themes. Not overly exciting, as a body of work, even if each one, taken by itself, may seem dramatic to anyone not conversant with this type of image.

To return to the theme of this musing: I can see now that taking numerous versions of what were, if I’m honest, very much the same handful of compositions, albeit in different locations, was extremely useful to my development into what I feel is more interesting photographic territory. I became aware, with each new set of images, that they were all becoming rather similar, in terms of both lighting and composition.

The real turning point came when I was in the Atacama desert and the southern Bolivian altiplano a year ago; not on a photography tour or workshop, but on a general holiday, just travelling about. More precisely, it came when I returned and started processing the images. The nature of the type of semi-organised trip I was on is that landscapes are mostly seen around midday, not at the ends of the day. At the time I had a vague idea that there was something better about dawn and dusk, but no real understanding of just how much difference there could be in the potential of the captured image. Years spent high on snow-covered mountains mean that I know very well how delicate colours can be in the pre-dawn light, but not how much better they can be photographically. The bright colours I captured on the South America trip were pleasing – they still are! – but the few images I took late in the day, mostly simply snapshots as memories, revealed notably more interesting light, albeit light ‘wasted’ on mediocre compositions of camp-sites and desert towns. I saw that I could capture more subtle and interesting colours using the lower light levels to be found at the ends of the day, and that this didn’t invariably mean bright images of sunrises and sunsets.

Another significant step forward, after months of trying to achieve subtle, or muted, colours without doing the whole get-up-very-early thing (I’m not exactly a ‘morning person’) was when I attended one of Bruce Percy’s excellent workshops in Scotland. I did this in large part so that I’d be ‘morally compelled’ to wake before dawn; so much easier to do when you know that prevaricating over the whole, arduous getting up process will result in several people waiting around for you, having themselves got up very early… The images I managed to capture on that trip were a large part of the answer to what I’d been trying to do for some time: many gently-varied colours and lots of detail in the RAW captures which can then be used to produce much stronger compositions and more interesting finished images than contrasty daylight can ever produce.

I don’t think that I could have come to the recognition of what I want to do with photography – which is currently very much tending towards the subtle and away from the shouting, bright colour, high contrast type of picture – had I not spent quite some time recognising the limitations of highly saturated, dramatic shots by making images of exactly that type. And now, my Flickr ‘stream is showing good signs of not containing solely ultra-wide angle shots. There certainly are some, and there will continue to be, along with the sun rising and setting, but I hope I’m now only using those devices when it helps the image in some way, rather than because the kit will do it, or because I know my friends will be impressed.

I should add that, whilst I’d been thinking along these lines and reassuring myself that taking ‘bad’ pictures was useful as part of my learning curve, I was provoked into thinking about it once more by an article on a similar subject in issue 9 of the on-line magazine Great British Landscapes, a great source for all sorts of thoughts on landscape photography.

I’d be interested to hear your comments on whether this is a completely normal progression, or whether I’m just being reactionary, the latter being entirely possible!

Musings on: naming photographs

Why is naming photographs so contentious?

I generally name my photographs. More precisely, I always name any finished images which I put anywhere public, but I don’t give the files themselves names; they’re all of the form ‘My name_date_time’, whether they’re the RAW files or the TIFFs, PSDs and JPGs which I create during my post-processing work-flow. So why is it necessary for me – and it seems the majority of other people posting images on-line – to give their images a name? Is it just pretension, or is it valuable or useful in some way?

I don’t have a definitive answer to this, of course, but the phenomenon is quite interesting. To me it seems that the act of naming an image gives it some form of solidity, an existence independent of being ‘just a photo’. It turns ‘another photo’ into ‘a work’ or ‘a defined thing’. Perhaps that’s pretension; perhaps it’s more the finishing touch to a creative process, somewhat like signing and naming a painting, which is not something I’ve heard much argument against.

From a practical perspective – and I feel this is sufficient justification by itself – it is vastly easier to talk about images if they have names. Before I started naming things, I recall having had several conversations of the following form:

“I like that one with the tree on the limestone pavement.”
“Which tree on which limestone pavement?”
“The one with the storm in the background.”
“Dark, bluish sky or is there actual lightning?”
“Neither: it’s sort of grey overall.”
“Square image, or landscape?”
“I’m not sure now.”

etc…

Starting that conversation with a memorable name saves a lot of time!

It’s practical then, but does a name change the image itself in any way; or, rather, the perception of the image on the part of the viewer? It can be argued that images should ‘speak for themselves’, and that having no name is best for that reason, that naming a photograph overlays the ideas of the photographer on the finished image. Conversely, given that the whole image is the idea of the photographer, surely this ability to add to the intent of the composition is entirely reasonable? It does change things though: a moderately good image with an especially good name, one which is pertinent to the content, or which draws the viewer’s attention to some aspect of the frame, can be made more significant than it would have been as ‘Untitled’.

I think the argument of giving each photograph a relevant name, one which adds to the image, is a strong one. As an example, I have an image I like very much, and which I shall write about in a later post, whose name is definitely important to me. In this case, the name reminds me of what I was thinking when I decided to compose the photograph. It’s called ‘Charcoal sunset’, and I named it that since I saw the scene as a post-sunset sky on which someone had painted clouds using a blunt piece of charcoal. As the creator of the image, it feels to me that conveying this thought process to viewers adds to the experience of looking at the photograph. It doesn’t matter whether they agree with this metaphorical vision or not; the point is to provoke more thought than would be present without the ‘leading’ title.

So, for me, in both practical and artistic senses, I’m in favour of titles, though I’ll caveat that with ‘at this point in time‘. A large part of the point of my writing these musings is to record how I’m thinking at this early stage of my progression in photography, and to see how that changes over time. Maybe I shall be writing the complete inverse of these opinions at some future point?

That said, I can already see myself producing a series of themed images and calling them ‘Untitled’ 1 to n… but then, that’s a name in itself, isn’t it?

I’d be interested to see your comments on this long-running debate!