Figuring out what you’ve got.
Sometimes you come back from a photography outing (or trip), look at your images and think, “Man am I a shitty photographer.” It doesn’t happen to me often (usually it’s just disappointment at some of the images), but it still happens. Well, this was one of those times. I looked at the images from Ireland, I looked at them again a few days later, and I looked at them yet again a few days later. Still - shit. I finally griped about it to Ann and she told me what I always tell her (she feels that way much more often than I do), “Forget about them, give it a few more days and then look at them again.” Fortunately, I did, and it worked.
When I went back to them, I realized why they looked so bad. Most of the images that were causing me problems (so many of them looked really dark) were the result of photographing in what are very difficult conditions to photograph under - looking into the sunlight. The ones here were even harder, often looking into the sunlight from inside a forested area. You have to really underexpose the image to make sure the highlights are not blown out. Look at the photograph above, the grasses are grey, not white.
I often have to remind myself that I don’t take photographs indiscriminately (blog pictures yes sometimes, but not photographs), so when something seems horribly wrong, I need to study the image and ask myself why I made it. Then I can decide whether it’s an image that just didn’t work out the way I’d planned, or whether I need to develop it with what I had in mind. These were images that fell in both categories, better when I developed them properly, but overall, falling short of what I was seeing.
But once I figured out why I made each particular image, it was a matter of developing it to bring out what I was trying to capture. The camera is not an eye and you have to work within its limitations to make an image, and push your skills to bring out in a photograph what the eye can see.
So I set out developing these images (and a few used in the trip blog post), relieved that I’m not a total failure.
The truth is, these images all fall a bit short of the beauty of what was there. It probably doesn’t help that they’re likely not really black and white images - I would have potentially been better off photographing them in color, but then the Baby Leica I had with me has a much smaller sensor and a much smaller dynamic range, so getting detail in shadows and lit areas probably would not have been possible.
You can’t always photograph what you can see. But sometimes, you have to try!