4 Photographs

I’m not exactly sure why, because it’s not as if I’m out shooting a lot (well, at all really), but my mind has been thinking a lot about photography and, more specifically, seeing.  For the sake of disclosure, the title may be misleading - yes, there are 4 photographs in this posting, but it’s really about one image.  

Let me get this out now, because it’s been something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and has helped me in my understanding of my own work - I do not consider myself to be a creative person.  I’m simply not.  No creative person can live with the same furniture and artwork arrangement for years on end and have absolutely no inclination to change things.  I’ll keep the same hair cut for next to forever, and would keep wearing the same clothes if they didn’t wear out.  I changed my preferred casual shoes only because the maker, Merrill, made a change in them that made them uncomfortable (I asked a clerk at a store why the last 3 pairs of shoes (I’d bought them for I think 6 or 7 years in a row - made shoe buying easy - and I wore them 80% of the time) felt odd at the back of my heels - he told me a few years back they changed from a cardboard to a plastic insert in that part of the shoe.  I now wear a different shoe - on my second pair, probably need to get another by the end of summer . . .).  And if you were to ask me if I am an artist I would simply laugh.

That realization, understanding actually, has helped me come to terms with the cringe I get every time I read the writings of one of my favorite contemporary photographers who writes about non-technical things.  He keeps talking about vision.  Artistic vision to be precise.  And he uses terms like, . . . in order to further our art . . . .  I don’t see what I do as art, it’s for me and, despite the fact that I do blog posts, really only for me.  It’s not for the outside world.  Actually, one of the main reasons I blog about photography is to share with Ann things that I would share if I were home.  It’s a part of keeping some semblance of normalcy in our lives, thinking out loud in the blog because I can’t do so in person.  

I realized that photography was for me, not something external, as I wrote my application essays for MFA programs in 1993.  As I wrote that first essay (while in the process of printing a portfolio of 4x5 black and white images), it dawned on me that I didn’t have to go to a school to continue doing what I was doing for the reason I was doing it; I didn’t need to teach to continue doing that; and that if I continued doing professional photography, I’d probably get sucked out of doing that.  I’d gone through 4 years of the army and photographed all over the country.  I didn’t need a degree to keep photographing for myself.  

So I went to Oregon, got master’s and law degrees, and then promptly stopped shooting.  My learning about the world took other forms.  No, I’m not an artist.

Then why do I photograph?  And why did I pick up a camera again (seriously) after a 10 year hiatus?  I am curious and interested in the world around me and beyond.  That curiosity extends well beyond the visual world - which is why I could put down the camera for so long - yet does include the visual world and what it can teach me.  Photography becomes an excuse to to get out and explore; a means by which to see and understand and to interact with the world.  That is why I photograph.  Photography becomes a struggle to see, to learn and to capture.  Minor White said, “One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”  

Now there are a lot of things that I see that I try to capture in photographs (things always change when you photograph something . . . the camera is not the eye(s), film not the retina, and a camera has no brain . . .  but that is another very, very long posting).  Mostly, I press the shutter to capture what I see.  Sometimes, I press the shutter to try to photograph something I can’t see, but I feel - and I hope to learn from either the process or the result of photographing.  Sometimes I press the shutter to capture the sheer beauty of our world.  And sometimes I press the shutter simply to record an image of those I love.  All are valid reasons for making a photograph.

This post is about seeing, and why I could be very frustrated about the making of an image.  The purpose was to photograph what I saw, and until this weekend, the image I was getting was not what I saw.  And I knew it.  And it bothered me.  Maybe this post will help you (well, really me) understand what was going on in my brain and why I just was not happy with the results until this weekend….

As I’ve mentioned, the camera is not reality, and all too often a photograph just does not capture what you see (or think you see).  This is the straight out of camera image that came from this shot.

While it’s kind of appealing, it does not capture what was there, there was a slight richness to the colors that is lost here.  And the photograph doesn’t come even close to the emotion one feels when you’re there looking at the painted hills. 

It didn’t take much effort to tweak the image to come closer to capturing what was there.  This comes close to it . . .

Unless your monitor is pretty good, you might not notice the slight improvement in contrast and richness in colors, but it was there in real life and not in the original, unadjusted digital image.  But still, that wasn’t all that I saw when I made the photograph, there was something more.  Yet when I made the photograph I didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to know what to do to make the image into what I had seen at the time I pressed the shutter.  In fact, it had really been so long that I wasn’t much sure what I saw and my intention in making the image - I just knew that I saw something that made me make (and keep returning to) this image.

When I was in Iraq, I experimented a bit with Lightroom, learning a bit about the program and set out to work on this image again.  I wound up with something that was pretty dramatic.

This is in many ways a much better photograph, it jumps out at you in a way the other two don’t.  Yet it’s not over the top.  And if I was a creative type, playing around with the colors and contrast this way might be the way to get to a “good” photograph.  Indeed, I’m sure you could push this process a lot more and get really artsy with it.  But I remained unsatisfied because, as interesting or as appealing as this image is, it’s not what I saw.

Nearly a year and a half later, I had the confluence of events I discussed in last weekend’s post.  I started thinking in my old black & white mode.  I thought about why I would point a camera at something, frame it a particular way, expose it in a particular manner and then develop the image to accentuate certain things.  Then I remembered this image and went to work.  This is what I got . . .

It’s this last one that leaves me satisfied.  This is what I was seeing when I pressed the shutter.  This is why I made this photograph.