Note
While you’re behind the camera—standing at the scene—you’re thinking about how to print that photograph.
I suggest that it’s better to have a good memory of a wonderful scene than a bad photograph of it, which will eventually become your memory of it. If you’re willing, able, and desirous of going beyond the scene, your creative potential is unlimited. Not only can you show the viewer what is important to you, you also can create whole new worlds. Minor White said, “We photograph something for two reasons: for what it is, and for what else it is.” Those are words to live by.
Creative photographers realize that conditions may not be ripe for an effective photograph even while they enjoy the most magnificent scenes. Ansel Adams did not photograph Yosemite Valley every time he was there, though I am sure he marveled at it each time. He photographed when extraordinary conditions made it photographically meaningful.
Step 4: Planning a Strategy for a Final Print
The final step of visualization is planning a strategy for achieving your final print. This involves determining your optimal exposure and development of the transparency, negative or digital capture, along with the method of printing it to achieve your goals. This means, in essence, that while you’re behind the camera—standing at the scene—you’re thinking about how to print that photograph in the traditional or digital darkroom. (The technical aspects of these considerations are found in Chapter 8–Chapter 11.)
At first, the notion of thinking about the printing process while standing behind the camera may strike you as distinctly odd, or maybe even distinctly impossible. In fact, it’s essential. You’ve done much of the work already: you decided to set up your camera at a specific point in space and aimed it in a specific direction with a carefully chosen focal length lens. You may have put a filter on that lens to help achieve your desired image. You chose an exposure (i.e., a combination of aperture and shutter speed) to properly record the image and determined how to develop that negative (for black-and-white film). Digitally, you may have made more than one exposure for full capture, so you must think of how to combine them into the final image. So the only remaining decision is how you’ll print it. Once you learn to do that, you’ll be mapping out a complete strategy from beginning to end for achieving the image you want. You’ll be integrating the whole process rather than doing it piecemeal.
This is how art is done. It’s impossible to imagine Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or Shostakovich writing random notes for a major composition without a rather complete feel for the entire work. It would be equally impossible to imagine Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Twain starting any major book or play without a complete idea of where the writing is going and how it will get there. Did Michelangelo start hacking away at a hunk of marble without envisioning a final product? Do you think Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, or O’Keeffe started dabbing paint on a canvas in the upper right corner, then continuing toward the lower left corner arbitrarily, or do you think each of them had a very complete idea of the finished painting right from the start? The answer is obvious. So, in the same way, it’s up to you to work through the entire process in your mind to avoid making bad decisions that could derail the whole process.
Let me give a simple example and briefly outline both a traditional film approach and a digital approach. Suppose you’re looking at a landscape with brilliant cumulous clouds towering above. The ground (i.e., the landscape below the huge clouds) may be an area of low contrast, but the clouds are extremely bright. If you’re shooting film and recognize while you’re behind the camera that you can darken the clouds by “burning” them when printing (i.e., giving them more exposure under the enlarger), then you don’t have to worry about the contrast when you expose and develop the negative. But if you simply look at the full contrast range without giving thought to the printing stage, you might decide to lower the overall contrast to encompass the brightness of the clouds—which would have the unfortunate effect of making the low contrast on the ground even lower. This would give you a rather “muddy” print. That’s not what you want.
When you think about printing while standing behind the camera, it creates a feedback loop that helps you determine your best exposure and development at the scene. If you’re shooting digital, you may need multiple exposures: one for the darker ground and perhaps several for the brilliant clouds. Later, you can layer these exposures and work on the local contrast of each portion on the computer (Chapter 11).
If you study the scene for compositional elements while simultaneously projecting forward to the final print, even while swooning over the scene, you can avoid the trap of making “record shots” (snapshots that simply tell everyone, “I was here”). When you think in terms of the final print right from the beginning, your percentage of successful exposures will rise dramatically. Without such foresight, you are simply exposing for the scene and hoping for a photograph. You’ll be lucky to get one!
Always keep in mind that you control the final print. As you begin to comprehend the extent of that control, you will see not only good scenes that can translate into fine photographs, but also ordinary scenes that can serve as a basis of equally fine photographs. Photography is a creative endeavor. The final print is your creation. Do not limit yourself to capturing the scene as you see it; start to think in terms of interpreting the scene and creating a work of art, a personal statement.
How Your Eye Differs from Your Camera
In Chapter 2, I detailed how scientific studies prove that the eye sees only a small area sharply and that it jumps around a scene, seeking the important parts and filling in the rest rather casually. That scientific underpinning leads to my definition of good composition as the artist’s method of “de-randomizing the eye’s motion” through an image.
Let’s delve deeper into the consequences of the eye seeing only small areas sharply while jumping around a scene. As the eye looks at a bright area, the pupil tends to close down quickly in order to allow you to see it without being blown away by the brightness. Then the brain turns down the brightness still more so that it doesn’t overwhelm you. When you glance at a dark area, your pupil dilates—or opens up—to allow you to see into that dark hole. Again, your brain helps open up that dark area so you can see it better. In other words, you look at any scene through multiple apertures.
But when you set the aperture for your camera, you expose the entire scene at one preset aperture. That’s quite different from the way your eyes see. So don’t be fooled. Your eyes do not see the scene the same way that a camera sees it. In fact, your eyes can and will fool you. Recognizing the differences can help, but the fact is that much experience is necessary to overcome them. Even then, there will be times that you’ll be fooled. That’s why it’s important to use a light meter with traditional photography or study the histogram with digital photography—the “truth tellers”—to give you factual data about the true light levels and relationships of light within a scene. Sometimes the information the meter or histogram gives you will be astonishing, telling you that something is not nearly as bright as you think it is, or that it’s much brighter than you’d thought. Knowing the true brightness level of various objects will also give you important clues about the problems you may face later in printing the image to your satisfaction.