What is real?

As Ann and I have been building the photo website (we’ve already found a fundamental flaw in how we thought the work-flow would go and made changes accordingly) I’ve been visiting the same images over and over as we worked to get the website ready for prime time.  One of those images kept bugging me every time I looked at it.  This is the image:

The thing about it is it just doesn’t look real with all that pink light.

Now, I’m not one of those people that try and argue that photographs mirror reality.  They don’t.  The world is not two-dimensional.  It is not black and white, or, if you prefer color - Kodachrome, Velivia, Provia, Astia, Ektachrome or any other “film” colors.  While photographs don’t lie (they just photographically capture light), photographers do.  And even when photographers are not being deceptive and are using photographic processes honestly (as I try to do), the photograph is not the same thing as the thing photographed. 

That said, I consider myself a straight photographer.  I photograph things as they appear and as I see them, using fundamentally photographic techniques to bring out certain aspects (think of the Ansel Adams quote I posted a couple of weeks ago).  Even if an image looks totally abstract, part of what is important to me is that there is a connection with reality to it - a viewer realizes what they are looking at is swirling water, or fogged glass, or details of a tree.  However, I’m not about to photoshop a unicorn into a photograph.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that I have no interest in doing it.  So it bugs me a bit when I look at something I’ve photographed and think to myself, “No one is going to believe that is real.”

Like that image above, the light looks unreal.  Yes, I’ve made some adjustments to it, but here’s the telling thing - I have actually desaturated the color in the image.  The pink light in the photograph is less intense than it actually was! 

The photograph is from our recent trip to Bandon where Ann made such incredible images.  A couple of mornings we got up well before sunrise to photograph (there may be another blog post about pre-morning photography).  This particular morning was partly cloudy which gave us some interesting skies as the sun was making its way westward.

At 6:47:57 (thank goodness for EXIF data!), the sun, which was still below the horizon, was starting to add some color to the skies.

I had taken several pre-dawn images from this area and pretty much decided I’d worked it over so I started walking around (leaving my camera on the tripod) looking to see where I’d go to photograph next.  Two minutes later it’s as if someone turned on the hot-pink lights (actually red sunlight bouncing down from the bottom of the clouds just to the east of us) and within seconds both Ann and I were shouting to each other our disbelief about the quality of light.  It didn’t seem real.  I quickly came to my senses and ran back to the camera and, without making any changes, made another photograph - these moments don’t last long!  This image was taken at 6:50:20, less than two and one-half minutes after the previous image:

Now pardon my diving into technical issues, but I want to explain something about these previous two images and the next three.  Ann and I photograph using what is called a RAW format.  It allows us to get a lot more information from the collected light than do JPG images, which is what most cameras use.  This allows for better color fidelity, tonal gradations and dynamic range (brightest to darkest areas) in our final images.  The drawback is that RAW images initially appear flatter, less vibrant (color wise) and less sharp than their JPG counterparts when downloaded from the camera, which means you have to manipulate each image to get it to looking normal and even more work to take advantage of the extra data to make it look exceptional (folks who don’t want to work with each image usually fall back to JPGs - they’re a lot easier to get ok results). 

So these middle images are the straight RAW files with only an adjustment for exposure (lightening or darkening the overall image) to make them all roughly the same brightness, and the same sharpening applied to each image.  I’m showing the straight RAW files (which I pretty much never do) so you can make uncorrupted comparisons between the different images.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . as you can see, the light turned incredibly pink within a matter of minutes.  After I made the image above, I moved over to where I was scouting out images earlier and made a series of images of a pair of rocks (you can see in the center of this image) both together and individually, recomposing and photographing as quickly as I could because I knew this light wouldn’t last forever. 

The image that opened up this post was taken at 6:55:10, less than 5 minutes after the first of the “pink” photographs.  It was the fourth of the different compositions I had made with this particular rock. 

Two minutes later, at 6:57:18, I made this image of the two adjacent rocks:

A bit less than 10 minutes after it all started you can see that the color is already starting to fade as the sun gets closer to the horizon and alters the way the light reflected off the underside of the clouds.  The pink is transitioning into a yellowish color. Just over a minute later, at 6:58:39 the pinkish sky is nearly gone, having lost all the intensity of light it had a few moments earlier.

The deep pinks are only in the reflections on the water, a result of the darkening that always occurs in reflected water. 

By the time I recomposed to photograph the big rock by itself, the unearthly pink light had dissipated.  7:04:42.  Seventeen minutes after we had the flood of pink we were again in a different world.  Sure, there were plenty of interesting colors in the sky, but they were the normal dawn colors we had grown used to.

Still, that pre-dawn light is special and we kept working, but not at the frantic pace of a few moments earlier. 

Eventually I returned to make a new composition, under different light, of the curved rock that begins this blog post.  You can see the glow of the not-quite sunrise on the top of the rock.  And no, this is not a RAW image.  It took a bit of work to bring out the colors in the sky and those reflected in the water.  And yes, that is the moon.  As I said, I don’t photoshop things into my images.  Though I’m not beyond removing a stick or two, or a piece of trash (not to mention that damned dust spot on my sensor).

So how do you photograph unbelievable light and make it believable?  Because it was real and I want to make the image believable!