On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 6:34 PM, Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 6/10/2017 2:10 PM, Bob Whitmire wrote:
>
>> Did they happen to have the first print of the negative, the one that
>> proves St Ansel was photoshopping long before photoshop ever came on the
>> scene?
>>
>
> <snip>
> OTOH, I certainly agree with you that he made very strong changes in his
> "performance" prints from straight printing. I had the pleasure quite a few
> years ago of seeing exactly what you propose, a fully realized print of
> "Hernandez" next to a straight print. The differences were startling. In a
> gallery of prints, and had this image not become famous, it would be easy
> to miss the straight print.
>
I saw this, too. At a museum in Boston, as I recall. May have been
Portland. On another occasion I saw an exhibition of his early prints
_without_ the performance part of the equation. I'd have thought any of us
passingly familiar with a camera and film and exposure could have made the
same shots. (Assuming we were willing to hike more than 500 yards from our
car.)
The comparison of the two Moonrises sparked the comment, albeit hyperbole,
that St Ansel was photoshopping long before photoshop was a thing. He did
it by waving his hands in front of a lightbulb. (More hyperbole.) I would
submit, however, that while very few of us ever could match AA in a
darkroom, very few of us also are able to work the kind of subtle magic
with LR and PS that distinguishes a good image from a Holy Shit! image. Two
entirely different processes, each requiring an ability to balance the
artistic with the technical. (I think life's a little like that, I do.)
>
> OTOH, I have long been interested in the differences between what, or
> perhaps how, a camera sees and how people may see the same thing. If it is
> true that they are different, should I prefer to carefully render how the
> camera 'saw' a subject, or try to duplicate something like how I saw it
> when I clicked the shutter?
>
> Galen Rowell expressed the problem well: "One of the biggest mistakes a
> photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain
> hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it"
>
I tried to learn this early on, after recognizing that landscape journalism
is really, really boring. There are deeper truths in beauty, and the artist
looks for them, or feels them and finds a way to tease them out. This is
true whether one is working with a camera (film or digital), brushes and
paints, pencils, pastels, or whether one is writing instead of creating
visual images. (Or creating visual images with words.)
> -------------------------
> Does it look as I recall?
> -------------------------
> As to the first level, I've recently been deep* in playing with one aspect
> of this, DoF. Those who have been looking at my posts over many months have
> seen a lot of focus stacked images. Some of the nicest comments seem to me
> to have been a result of the focus stacking, although I haven't always
> mentioned it and I suspect the viewers often didn't realize I had used it.
>
> This little Viola happens to be in the ground in our yard. To spare knees,
> imagine it is in a pot on a table. <http://www.moosemystic.net/Ga
> llery/tech/Focus%20Stacking/DeepViola.htm>
>
> The first two images are slices, and not super shallow, shot @ f8 - it's
> just a deep subject. Which image most closely duplicates the way you would
> visually experience such a plant in person?
>
I can't answer this with any degree of innocence because I'm familiar with
the processes of the eye and the camera and the software. That said, the
focus-stacked image is how I imagine I would see the flower, though medical
science tells us that's not true at all. Our eyes 'focus stack', too, but
so swiftly and seamlessly we are not aware of it.
> We have all spent our lives viewing photos with DoF shallower than our own
> visual experience of the subject would have been, because there was no
> alternative. Just because we are used to living with the limitations of
> optical physics doesn't mean it's the best way to represent the subject.
>
True. We have been trained to expect certain things, and to name certain
things good. The late Dr. Flash/Focus used to extol the virtues and
excoriate the sinfulness of out-of-focus objects in the foreground, except
in the rarest of occasions. When I look at photo sites today, I barely go
two or three without seeing someone talking about getting the proper object
sharply focused in the foreground and letting DoF dribble off toward the
background, simply because that's the best way to compose a very wide angle
landscape. I think this is the basis of the so-called 'West Coast School'
of landscape photography. At least almost all of the images I see from that
'school' fit the criteria of close foreground object, distant play of some
kind of light/clouds, etc. Frankly, I think it's got to the point of boring
now, but maybe I'm just being pedantic, and I know Chuck won't be posting a
scorching rejoinder. <g>
> -------------------------
> Does it recall the feeling I had when looking at the subject, perhaps the
> feeling that led me to take the shot in the first place?
> -------------------------
>
Indeed I did struggle with this all the time. Still, do, in fact, whether
working with my iPhone camera, my wee Sony R100, or my keyboard. I could
go all mystical and call it seeing within seeing, but I won't. <g> I 'see'
two stages here. The first is the capture. No camera captures what they eye
sees, especially if one shoots RAW, which generally produces rather dull,
washed out images. It's not until one loads the RAW file into one's
software and goes to work that the real work of bringing out the image
begins. The second is to know the business of moving sliders or making
masks. It is not easy. (See way above.) I tend(ed) to overcook, and pull
back, and make a lot of test prints until I got something on paper that met
my expectations of the shot as I recall taking it. Not duplicating the
shot, but meeting the expectations I had when I tripped the shutter. It is
not a distinction without a difference. Many times I found in post
processing that there was more to what I thought I saw than what I thought
I saw the first time I saw it, and I went for it with varying degrees of
success. Sometimes I'd make print and look at it months later and go back
to fiddle some more and make a better print. (Occasionally the reverse was
true. Sigh.)
> What Reality Moose
Indeed Redux! Reality is rather slippery, I've found. And as a 'pretty
pictures for tourists' photographer, I often found that whatever my notion
of reality was just didn't cut the mustard. I can now confess that most of
the time I didn't really work with a plan, just let my moving of sliders or
masks to with what I perceived was the flow. I know others who have a very
precise way of constructing the path to meet their expectations of their
shots. I know one photographer who likes to draw the picture before he
takes it.
Reality is a bitch. Not meaning to go all Neil DeGrasse Tyson on you, but
every photo we take depicts a trip through time. The closest foreground
object is still in the past because it takes time not only for the light to
travel from the object to the camera, but also through your eyes and into
your brain to facilitate the decision about whether to trip the shutter.
And all the way to the farthest object in the background we get farther and
farther back in time. So it's not true that a photograph captures 'a
moment'; it captures an almost infinite series of moments and compresses
them into one image, but not into one moment, and even then when we look at
the photograph we're looking back in time at an image depicting an earlier
time travel.
Enough? I think so. <g>
--Bob Whitmire
Quantum Neanderthal
--
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