Devil's Garden - September 19, 2019

Sometimes you have to work to find an image.  Other images, well, they slap you across the face, screaming to be made.  Kind of like Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K) in Men in Black, screaming to the giant cockroach “Eat me! EAT ME!!!!”  Except in my case, it’s, “Shoot me, shoot me!!!”  Today’s image is one of those.  

That said, it doesn’t mean making a good photograph, even one that screams to be made, is easy.  When I passed by this formation at Devil’s Garden by Hole in the Rock Road in Utah, I immediately knew there was an image to be made.  In fact, the very first thing that passed through my mind was memories of my 4x5 days, then the wish that I had a 4x5 camera with me, and then a coming-back-to-reality moment where I realized there is nothing wrong with the camera I have.

The image before me was the type of image I was constantly looking for in my 4x5 days.  A play of light, shadow and texture that, if exposed correctly and processed correctly, would produce magical prints in the wet darkroom (there is nothing quite like a high quality silver gelatin print, bromide paper to be precise, with just a touch of selenium toning). 

I forgot who I read it from, but it’s said that if you can learn to see in black and white, that it will help your color photography as well.  To this I must add, “if” you ever learn to see in color.  I’m not sure I really have.  I at least don’t feel like I have a “sense” for color.  Certainly not like the way Joe Cornish can see colors in landscapes.  Now black and white is a different story.  I first saw this image in black and white, so that’s how I decided to develop it.

While it would be great to claim that the image above is straight out of camera, it’s not.  Ansel Adams once said, “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.”  Well, to continue the paraphrasing - God made a lot of mistakes at that moment.   There is quite a bit of burning and dodging in the image above, mostly to lower the highest values so that you can see some texture in the rock, and to brighten some of the darkest areas for the same reason.  The difficulty is in knowing how far is too far and, in the end, keeping the over-all image looking natural.  Even now, I see an area that I think I should darken just a bit more (it is so much easier doing a burn or dodge on the computer instead of in the wet darkroom, which then took several minutes before you could even see the result).  If I decide to print this image in black and white, I may need to make that adjustment first.  

Given the nature of the light, the play in forms and, indeed, the differing color of the rock as well as the contrast with the light blue sky, I couldn’t not try the image in color.  In that respect, color does make a difference. 

What’s really interesting is that you usually can’t just recreate the same burn-dodge template in color that you used on the image in black and white.  In some ways it can be easier working in color - you often don’t need to distinguish between different adjacent colors that may be the same tonal value.  But burning and dodging does have its place to help reveal form and depth in an image.  So I had to figure out what controls were useful from the first image and what weren’t (that’s where asking “why” every time you do something has its benefits) and then to figure out what else I needed to do to that was unique to color imagery (something I feel woefully inadequate in evaluating).  

And, as often seems to be the case, one is never really “done.”  At some point you call it quits - you can always make one more tweak, one more adjustment (sometimes realizing that it’s gone too far and you have to bring it back a bit).  But the question becomes, does it really improve the image?  Or does it just make the image different in some way?  If I can’t see something that I think needs improving, I stop with the image, knowing I can always come back to it.  Sometimes you just need to let an image sit for a few days (or weeks, or months) before you return to it.  (Plus, some say looking at the same image on a monitor over an extended period of time tends to lessen your sensitivity to the changes or the image’s overall effect, so you really should walk away from the monitor every so often even while you’re working.)  That’s the long way of saying I stopped with the image as it was above.

But while I was exporting the images to write the blog a few days later, I decided I wasn’t satisfied with the native format ratio (2x3), so I decided to crop just a bit from the bottom.  No other changes, just a minor crop.  It’s more like a 5x7 now, which was the ratio I used to use when I put black gaffer’s tape on the back of my LCD (before Fujifilm changed the menus in a firmware update and I needed to see under the gaffer’s tape for information) and is a ratio I much prefer over 2x3.

I think it’s right, but I’ll see when I return to the image.  Because it’s one of those images that not only screams to be photographed, it screams to be printed.  Which means I’ll carefully study the image again before I decide to print it.

I guess Ann and I will need to get moving on acquiring a new printer.  That itself has been a story . . . but one for another time.