TECHNICAL DETAILS
Fall Dawn Off Centerville Road, Anoka County, Minnesota, Oct. 9, 2015
Leica D-Lux (Typ 109)
54mm (equiv.) 1/30 @ f/8, ISO 200
Postprocessing in Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC
REVISIONIST HISTORY
“The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.” – Ansel Adams
Every now and then I’m struck with the notion of revisiting an old image. It could be from years ago. I just want to reinterpret the scene. Perhaps it’s because something never satisfied me about my original presentation, or maybe my tastes changed, or possibly just because I want to look at it with a different perspective. I’ve done radical transformations of images I really liked. I’ve also done subtle changes to fix a shadow that never sat well with me, or a blemish I missed in the haste to get through processing.
This morning I was housebound, waiting on a service call on the clothes dryer. Leigh and Vivia had left before dawn for a volunteer morning at a Special Olympics event, leaving me to handle the repair crew. I wanted to be with them, as the event was a charity polar plunge–a jump through the frozen surface of Lake Bde Maka Ska to raise money for the organization and fill out Vivia’s volunteer hours for National Honor Society. It was a beautiful clear morning, and the thought of shooting the fun of the icy splashing and breathless sputtering that was sure to characterize the morning left me pining. So I was cruising through some older images and this one jumped out. Time for a little revisionist history.
Almost always when I do this, the new interpretation never sees the light of day. I play with it, nod to myself that I could have done it that way to begin with, and move on. My past images are a record of what my aesthetic was at the time, and I don’t usually see fit to change that. Today, as I mulled the changes I’d make to this particular scene, I thought of my act of reinterpreting images as something to share. Should an image be fixed forever with the vision held closest to the time of capture? Or is an interpretation of an image fluid, subject to changing over periods as one’s sensibility evolves? There’s actually quite a lot of historical precedent for this dialog. Arguably, it’s as old as the photographic medium. As Ansel Adams referenced in the quote at the top of this post, by implication, no two performances are exactly the same. While that has changed a little in the era of digital printing, the concept certainly applies to interpretation of a RAW file, which is the equivalent of a digital negative.
It’s suprising–and a bit frustrating, I’ll admit–that people still view the production of a finished image as somehow ‘tainted’ when it’s been developed beyond the straight-out-of-camera shot. The #nofilter hashtag that’s in vogue amongst some social photography posters drives me crazy. While they see it as some sort of badge of honor to present their image ‘without alteration’ (sic), that’s not what is happening at all. It just demonstrates a lack of understanding of the modern photographic process, in my opinion. What they see as somehow pure, most well-versed photographers see as incomplete at best, outright lazy at worst. I confess to trending toward the later. I do agree, however, that this discussion is applicable to photography as a visual medium for expression, and not photojournalism. To the documentarian, anything beyond color balancing, sharpening and some modest dodge-and-burn, is anathema and cause for banishment. By and large, my photographic endeavors do not cross into photojournalism.
Look no farther than Adams’ evolution of his iconic “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” as an exemplar of how an artist’s vision for a scene evolves over time. A quick Google of his 1941 masterpiece will yield comparisons of his early prints versus his later interpretations. They are utterly distinct, yet derived from the same negative. Any cursory searching for instructions for printing well known negatives by famous photographers will result in a plethora of hits with marked up prints showing hugely complex zones of differing exposures on the printing paper. The digital era is no different in intention. Now, a photographer is presented with raw sensor data that is interpreted through a series of software processes to yield the desired result. And this is where the fallacy of #nofilter arises. We make choices about an image with every step in the creative process: the lens, the framing of the shot, the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO sensitivity settings, and even the brand of sensor being used. If three people shooting the exact same scene side-by-side at the same moment captured their images on a Canon, a Nikon and an iPhone, respectively, the resulting unaltered images would each look notably different from the others. Their sensors are different, their interpretive software is different, the field of view is different. A JPEG file produced from any of these is merely the interpretation of that already-distinct view programmed by some software or firmware engineer at the company producing the imaging device. So by not crafting your own interpretation—by adopting the #nofilter approach—you’re just saying “I’ll let somebody at Sony (or Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon…) make the choice for me.” I’m sorry, but you’re not being pure in any sense. You’re being faithful to some product design decision crafted to accommodate average images and made by engineers far removed from your own photographic experience. And so lest my opinion on this want for clarity, I am an affirmative advocate that as part of an intentional photographic process, almost every image captured on any kind of device and in any lighting condition usually must be post-processed to achieve the artist’s intention. Doing less is simply leaving the job unfinished. If you want a snapshot that’s presented straight out of camera, fine! Go for it! It’s a snapshot. If that makes me an elitist SOB, I’ll don that mantle. </rant>
And so this morning I reinterpreted my image of the dawn breaking into a dramatic sky that I shot a couple of years ago. I would categorize my efforts today as a noticeable, but not revolutionary, reworking of this scene. If you’ve clicked on the image above to see the two versions next to each other, the question is, which do you prefer? Just don’t ask me which one is ‘right’.
If you want to know which of these was my earlier interpretation and which is the product of today’s efforts, you can read my original journal entry of capturing this image from October of 2015 at this <LINK>.
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