Seeing and capturing – photography dept.

I had this out-of-mind sort of experience this week while discussing a photo editing software in a group of people. I was asked how I had my own screen arranged with editing options and I reported the three tools that I have as my default. Most of the discussion was about applying all the filters and cropping and normal things that editing softwares do.

As the short session ended, I realized that of the group, I was probably the only person there who had ever taken, developed and printed photos – on paper, gasp! – taken and developed slides, and perhaps I was part of a vanishing photo culture that tries to take the photo we want and not rely too much on post-editing.* This idea rattled around in my head for quite awhile and obviously it’s still stuck there.

With such a huge percentage of photos being taken with the ubiquitous cellphone’s camera (I do this too), this has become the bulk of how people experience photography, and it is the current evolution of point and shoot. Hold it up. Click.

I get it. And sometimes, the best I can hope for in a situation is to take enough photos of the same scene that one comes out as I hope – too windy, blowing stuff, fast changing light etc. Digital film is even cheaper than that mentioned in “film is cheap.”

Why did my brain get stuck on all this? I guess because it gave me a moment to realize something about how I take photos. I usually take photos because I want to show people, including you gentle reader, something I saw or because I want to remember something about it, the colors, textures, or the moment itself. I try not to overdo and become the person with the camera stuck in the up position only seeing things through the view screen.

So it seems my film days carry over to today. See something, see something worth sharing or remembering, take a photo to capture it as best I can, in the camera’s view. That last isn’t always possible. It’s not like I don’t sometimes crop out extraneous things at the edges of the photo but if I can do that while taking the photo I try to.

The eye can see more than the camera. Editing for me, after the fact, means trying to get what I saw into the view that I’m showing you. Could be an adjustment of levels (ah the tingling of the gray-scale senses) or color temperature (sometimes fluorescence is unavoidable) or a slight framing of the scene. I feel great though when the adjustments are minor and I upload and there you go.

Sometimes that’s not possible. I get it. I can’t zoom in close enough or get far enough away. My camera sees everything even if my mind conveniently blocks things out. My brain ignores the slant of a horizon which onscreen makes me look inebriated. But that’s my overall plan.

I remember holding up the sleeve of negatives and thinking, ‘that one and that one’ and finding that yes, they had the right amount of contrast and the range of value and the sharpness and arrangement and blam, it was all there on paper. That was a moment. Maybe that moment is more quickly gotten to these days but it’s still a moment that happens.

* There are still many serious photographers who take all aspects of this much more seriously than I do. I don’t pretend to be expert at any of this but I’m just reporting my own moment of realization here.