Gimmicks

I am so sick of photographic gimmicks.

And it seems that the only way to get ahead in this business right now is to make use of them.

Contest winners in recent years are often gimmicky. Clients want the certain special looks which an artist creates then everyone copies.

Photography has always been an art where the subject was center-stage. But the general public has apparently bored of looking at good photographs of interesting people, places and things. Now folks want to see computer modified versions of reality that bear little resemblance to the actual subjects. Photographs where someone's aptitude with a computer becomes the central factor. Case in point.

I make no bones about it, I am not a fan of Photoshop. Never before in the history of this art has there existed a tool which so easily allows someone to transform crappy photographs into stunning works of art ... or whatever they are.

But I take solace in the fact that there have always been photographic gimmicks of one kind or another, and that the photographs that stand the test of time do not employ them. Yousuf Karsh's portraits are a prime example.

First Presbyterian - 16

First Presbyterian Church in Independence, Kan. View On Black

It seems that I wasn't being quite fair to iPhoto the other day.

I took a crappy shot and couldn't make it what I wanted with iPhoto, but I could make it "better" with Photoshop.

The other part of Mr. Weese's article talks about exposing the photograph properly to begin with, then using the image editor on the computer to fine tune the image into what you want it. With film you exposed for the shadows and developed for the highlights. With digital it's the other way around, expose for the highlights and "develop" for the shadows.

And while I've known that basic fact of digital photography, I've never really used it. As a newspaper photographer I strove to get my photos the way I wanted them as much as possible in camera. I did not like sitting in front of the computers, futzing around with the picture.

Now that I'm taking my photography in a more artistic direction I find it behooves me to invest the time in developing my photos in order to make better images.

The Monkey Island photo is a great example of how I used to take pictures. I exposed for the castle/habitat structure, which made the sky go almost completely white. iPhoto couldn't fix it, Photoshop kind of could.

But the image of the church above I exposed "correctly." I spot metered from the sky setting it to just beneath the point where it would wash out. And then I used software to bring out the tones in the building.

The surprising part to me was that iPhoto did an excellent job with this image. I couldn't do any better with Photoshop. So it appears that iPhoto is a perfectly capable program if you hand it a well-exposed image.

Monkey Island

A swan swims in the moat around Monkey Island at Ralph Mitchell Zoo in Independence, Kan. Miss Able, the first monkey to fly in outer space, was born at this zoo.
View On Black

I didn't like this shot when I first took it. Primarily because the sky was pretty well blown out.

But then I read Carl Weese's excellent article, "Do Not Fear the Sun", over at The Online Photographer blog.

The main thrust of his article doesn't really apply to this situation since it was a mostly cloudy day. But what really struck me was his description of the use of the various tools in the Adobe Camera Raw program.

Previously, I had a general idea of what many of those controls did, but his article really (ahem, forgive the pun) shed some light on the subject.

Luckily I still had less than a day left on my trial version of Photoshop Elements so I popped this photo into it and fiddled around with the settings some. And I definitely like the results.

I had been using iPhoto since I got my dSLR. It's a very simple easy to use program and the results are generally very good. But I can't get anything close to this image with iPhoto, the range of tones was simply too great and the controls of iPhoto too limited.

So thank you Mr. Weese for the wonderful article.

Mr. Weese writes occasionally for The Online Photographer, and he also runs the Working Pictures and WPII blogs. I've long been a fan of his work, even though it often frustrates me. His photographs are very subtle, often leaving me scratching my head. But I simply cannot stop looking at them. Check out his blogs.