The Student Becomes The Teacher
Ansel once said, drawing upon his training as a classical pianist, “Photographers don’t work hard enough!” Oh, wait, wrong quote. Yes, he did say that, but what I wanted to say was that he used to describe the making of the negative as the “score” and the print (or these days the developed image on your computer screen) the “performance.” In my previous blog post, actually written two months ago, I couldn’t figure out why an image didn’t work. Well, after a short chat with Ann, I found out that the problem wasn’t with the score, it was I had just really bombed the performance.
As I mentioned above, I’d written the “Why doesn’t it work?” post on June 9th. I’ve gotten into the habit of writing down my thoughts, particularly blog ideas, whenever they come to me, and then polishing them off whenever I can get to them. Then, sometimes, I put them in the saved folder for the website and then pull one of them out when there seems to be too long a gap in-between blog postings. Add to this the fact that, while Ann and I will share images and often ask each other about them, our offices (read: computers) are in separate rooms and I don’t see all of her images, nor her mine, and you wind up with opportunity just waiting to happen.
So it didn’t surprise me on Saturday, while in the car heading up to Mummy’s house, Ann says, “I’ve never seen this image!” I glanced over and saw she was looking at the blog post. “So what do you think about it?” “I don’t think you’re right.” (Now comes the part that leads to my saying, “Ann’s always right . . .”). I replied, “How so?” “Well, I think you’re right about your description of the different elements, but I think you haven’t developed the image right. I would have . . . .” And over the next couple of minutes she described a crop and a few burning and dodging steps she would use to emphasize parts of the image that she thought would help lead the eye through the image, and start to prioritize some of the components.
Smart guy that I am, later that afternoon, when I had a few-minute break between chores, what did I do? (If you need a hint, see the above parenthetical!) I pulled up the image and quickly developed both a black and white and color version following Ann’s advice. During another break, I asked her to check out the images, and she had a few additional minor suggestions which, as you can guess, I implemented.
Ann preferred the black and white version, so I’ll show that one first.
Ann says she thinks that removing the color from the image (although the B&W is not simply a conversion of the color, it was developed separately) allows one to more readily manage the various elements. The color adds one additional aspect to the image and winds up competing with everything else. She’s got a point.
Well, the image is no longer lifeless. There’s a dynamic quality to the image now that leads the eye around whereas before, in Ann’s words, the eye didn’t know where to go because everything was competing with everything else. (Do I really have to note that she was right?)
The color image has improved as well for the very same reasons. There’s an increased sense of depth and the tree has a presence that it didn’t before. All because I lightened some areas and darkened others. Oh yeah, and cropped a bit off the top.
Interesting thing though is that all I did was emphasize the tonal differences already present in the stone. Perhaps that was what I was responding to, in part, when I made the image. To be honest, I don’t recall. In any event, if it was, I’d forgotten it by performance time with the image.
When I published “Why doesn’t it work?” I had no idea that I’d be writing this post, or working with this image any further. I guess I was wrong. I’m incredibly proud of Ann’s progress with photography. She jokes that it’s because she has a good teacher. Well, this time I’m glad the student became the teacher.