[Slideshow: partial screen captures from the Adobe Lightroom program, showing four basic phases in the editing of a photo I eventually posted on Instagram. The first two really required little if any “manipulation” on my part; they happened in the camera itself. My involvement didn’t even click in until step (3). For some technical details, see this separate page (opens in new tab/window).]
Instagram is typically counted among the social media, but it doesn’t in fact quite “fit” among Facebook, Twitter, etc. After all, it focuses (ha) not on the social — not on human interaction — but simply on visual representations of the world: pictures. The general nature and purpose of a given picture depends on the person or institution who posts it: it might be self- or product-promotional, or artistic, or more — or less — clever, or topical, or whatever. Within each of those general categories are various more precise ones: landscape vs. portrait, for example, or pure photography vs. photography-of-other-media (paintings, calligraphy, video, and so on).
Still, after you’ve been on Instagram for a while, it’s hard not to find yourself interacting, via comments and replies, mostly with a consistent group of people — maybe people you know from elsewhere online, or those whom you first found on IG (as it’s sometimes called) and gravitated to based on a common interest — subjects, genres, media, whatever.
One of the folks whose daily posts and commentary about photography I always look forward to seeing recently posted this photo:
[Image used by permission of Chris Sutcliff (Instagram: oldmansutty77). Thanks, Chris!]
…accompanied by this caption:
I’m interested in how you guys edit your work – do you wing it or do you know what you’re doing? Do you use presets or, like me, hurl yourself at edits with no plan or talent? I feel like I’m winging it with occasional flashes of actual insight. I don’t want to tell you how long I spent on this tree (and the alternate shot before it which ended up in the bin under a hail of verbal abuse). I went to the extreme edges and back again, and I suppose I must have learned a lot along the way; lessons like never ever photograph a backlit tree. Everything about this shot was a total bastard, and I have hated every second of editing it. I’m glad it’s dead. It can’t be just me that experiences this level of frustration. Please share your own tales of woe, join me in ineptitude. Thanks.
As it happens, I thought the photo of the tree was just fine as posted — no post-processing recriminations “necessary.” But I also recognized the misery — boy howdy, did I ever!
Bear in mind, first, one of the most basic but maybe most often overlooked facts of photography, whether “real” (i.e., old-fashioned, film-to-darkroom-to-paper, analog) or digital (i.e., images recorded on magnetic or optical media) photography: what you see in the photo is not an “accurate” image of what the eye saw at that moment.
I mean, consider: when do you ever see the real world as a static freeze-frame? Every second of every day, what you’re looking at changes, however slightly. So the click of the shutter has already imposed a level of artifice on what’s “out there.”
And you’re always limited by the technology available. From daguerreotypes, tintypes, all those old-timey technologies, right up through present-day high-quality black-and-white analog photography, no colors at all are in your palette: just shades of gray. And at the high end, the most high-quality artificial representations of the visual world, even — maybe especially — in color, no camera yet made can do what the human eye does… because no camera yet made is hooked up to a human optical nerve and the cells of the visual cortex.
I’m tempted to argue that no camera ever made will ever be able to match the human eye. But as we know, bets about technology’s limits tend to be losing ones. For now, though, it’s true.
Furthermore, even the very best, most perfectly composed and lighted shot never seems quite so to the photographer’s eye (or to his editor’s, if it’s for publication somewhere). Modern cameras let you fire off hundreds of shots a minute, if you’d like, one right after the other… and not a single one may be perfectly “right.” The background changes, or the subject’s eye is in focus but a hand is blurred in motion, or a cloud covers the sun, or the photographer hiccups in mid-exposure, or the subject does. (It’s surprising, in fact, how much we’ve come to intuitively disregard the stuff in the margins of our attention.) Ansel Adams’s photos are rightly regarded as touchstones in black-and-white analog photography perfection; but if you were given his original negatives, a fully-stocked darkroom, and the instructions for making a print from a negative, you might spend three weeks or more trying to duplicate what he did.
All of which is to say: what you see in a photograph, no matter what the technology used to create it, it has always been subject to human manipulation. And for this reason, the human “manipulator” — the engineer who designed the camera and the worker who assembled it; the photographer; the editor; perhaps the gallery curator — has always followed the guidelines laid out by his or her muse. It might be a muse of optical science or electronics, or of predecessors in the genre, or of artistic vision, or of the realities of production (e.g., transferring from a color slide to a color photograph in a magazine). It might be a team of muses, working together or struggling against one another. But again, you will never, ever see a photograph divorced from any human judgment at all.
So let’s go back to Chris Sutcliff’s anguished query: how much is enough? how much is too much? have I even done “enough” yet? Once you’ve clicked the shutter, once you’ve downloaded the image from your camera to your computer and opened it in the right software (whatever “right” means!), when do you stop tinkering with it? What’s the little bell in your head that goes “Ding!” when it’s just right?
“Enough”; “too much” — in my view, those are just gotcha terms: traps for the unwary. The only decision to make, at least for someone shooting and editing his own photographs, comes down to this: that person‘s decision at the final moment. Of course, not one of us is Michelangelo, Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, J.M.W. Turner, Georgia O’Keefe, or Laurie Anderson. But I’d bet anything that regardless of medium, every one of them, with almost every single work, just got to a point where they, too, simply… stopped.
Me? I have no bell in my head. If I’m lucky, a photograph comes to resemble what I’d imagined in the split-second before I clicked the shutter. (Often, for me, such photos come from a caption or a title which bubbled to the surface a moment earlier. I’m sure I’ve got thousands of photos which would’ve been just fine if I’d ever come up with some satisfactory way of labeling them!) Some photos require barely a touch of “pizzazz”: a crop, say, or a very slight vignette effect. At the other extreme, some photos never look right at all to me until they’ve been run through a Chamber of Digital Photography Horrors.
In the latter case, they’ve often ended up in a series tagged #jesstorypix, captioned with micronarratives describing a dream or other fantastical series of events which the tortured photo suggests to me.
But even if I did have a bell in my head, and could describe it — or better yet, pull it out of my head and share it — it wouldn’t help Chris at all. Even in the digital-photography, Lightroom-and-Photoshop world, the only signal that something is done remains pretty much what artists have always said to themselves before walking away from a project for the last time: the phrase good enough.
Maybe it’s not good enough for your preferred audience. But since you can’t (and I’d say shouldn’t) even try to poll them all for a consensus, you, and you alone, would still have to eventually throw the switch. And you’d probably never be able to explain to someone else why you’d done it then, not sooner or later. The best you can say is: It was good enough.
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