{"id":24028,"date":"2021-02-06T10:56:35","date_gmt":"2021-02-06T15:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=24028"},"modified":"2021-02-06T10:57:09","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T15:57:09","slug":"when-does-a-photographer-know-an-image-is-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/when-does-a-photographer-know-an-image-is-done\/","title":{"rendered":"When Does a Photographer Know an Image Is &#8220;Done&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow aligncenter\" data-autoplay=\"true\" data-delay=\"5\" data-effect=\"fade\"><div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_container swiper-container\"><ul class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_swiper-wrapper swiper-wrapper\"><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"769\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-24029\" data-id=\"24029\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject01_orig.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject01_orig.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject01_orig.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject01_orig.jpg?resize=768%2C577&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject01_orig.jpg?w=1405&amp;ssl=1 1405w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_caption gallery-caption\">(1) Original&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"769\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-24030\" data-id=\"24030\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject02_asshot.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject02_asshot.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject02_asshot.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject02_asshot.jpg?resize=768%2C577&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject02_asshot.jpg?w=1405&amp;ssl=1 1405w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_caption gallery-caption\">(2) as shot (i.e., cropped by camera)&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"769\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-24031\" data-id=\"24031\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject03_asedited.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject03_asedited.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject03_asedited.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject03_asedited.jpg?resize=768%2C577&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject03_asedited.jpg?w=1405&amp;ssl=1 1405w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_caption gallery-caption\">(3) as manually cropped and edited&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"769\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-24032\" data-id=\"24032\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject04_asedited-bw.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject04_asedited-bw.jpg?resize=1024%2C769&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject04_asedited-bw.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject04_asedited-bw.jpg?resize=768%2C577&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/bridgeproject04_asedited-bw.jpg?w=1405&amp;ssl=1 1405w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_caption gallery-caption\">&#8230;and (4) as converted to B&#038;W<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/li><\/ul><a class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-prev swiper-button-prev swiper-button-white\" role=\"button\"><\/a><a class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-next swiper-button-next swiper-button-white\" role=\"button\"><\/a><a aria-label=\"Pause Slideshow\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-pause\" role=\"button\"><\/a><div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_pagination swiper-pagination swiper-pagination-white\"><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\" id=\"top\"><em>[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 &#8220;manipulation&#8221; on my part; they happened in the camera itself. My involvement didn&#8217;t even click in until step (3). For some technical details, see <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/finishing-an-image-some-details\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this separate page<\/a> (opens in new tab\/window).]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Instagram is typically counted among the social media, but it doesn&#8217;t in fact quite &#8220;fit&#8221; among Facebook, Twitter, etc. After all, it focuses (ha) not on the social &#8212; not on human interaction &#8212; 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 &#8212; or less &#8212; 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, after you&#8217;ve been on Instagram for a while, it&#8217;s hard not to find yourself interacting, via comments and replies, mostly with a consistent group of people &#8212; maybe people you know from elsewhere online, or those whom you first found on IG (as it&#8217;s sometimes called) and gravitated to based on a common interest &#8212; subjects, genres, media, whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the folks whose daily posts and commentary about photography I always look forward to seeing recently posted this photo:<\/p>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"819\" class=\"wp-image-24037\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/treefromhell_oldmansutty77.jpg?resize=1024%2C819&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/treefromhell_oldmansutty77.jpg?resize=1024%2C819&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/treefromhell_oldmansutty77.jpg?resize=300%2C240&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/treefromhell_oldmansutty77.jpg?resize=768%2C614&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/treefromhell_oldmansutty77.jpg?w=1080&amp;ssl=1 1080w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/CKjCdbPnARS\/\" target=\"_blank\">Image<\/a> used by permission of Chris Sutcliff (Instagram: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/oldmansutty77\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">oldmansutty77<\/a>). Thanks, Chris!]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;accompanied by this caption:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>I&#8217;m interested in how you guys edit your work &#8211; do you wing it or do you know what you\u2019re doing? Do you use presets or, like me, hurl yourself at edits with no plan or talent? I feel like I&#8217;m winging it with occasional flashes of actual insight. I don&#8217;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&#8217;m glad it&#8217;s dead. It can&#8217;t be just me that experiences this level of frustration. Please share your own tales of woe, join me in ineptitude. Thanks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>As it happens, I thought the photo of the tree was just fine as posted &#8212; no post-processing recriminations &#8220;necessary.&#8221; But I also recognized the misery &#8212; boy howdy, did I <em>ever!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Bear in mind, first, one of the most basic but maybe most often overlooked facts of photography, whether &#8220;real&#8221; (i.e., old-fashioned, film-to-darkroom-to-paper, analog) or digital (i.e., images recorded on magnetic or optical media) photography: <em>what you see in the photo is not an &#8220;accurate&#8221; image of what the eye saw at that moment<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, consider: when do you ever see the real world as a static freeze-frame? Every second of every day, what you&#8217;re looking at changes, however slightly. So the click of the shutter has already imposed a level of artifice on what&#8217;s &#8220;out there.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you&#8217;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 &#8212; maybe especially &#8212; in color, no camera yet made can do what the human eye does&#8230; because no camera yet made is hooked up to a human optical nerve and the cells of the visual cortex. <\/p>\n\n\n<p style=\"margin-left: 30px; margin-right: 30px; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.25em;\"><em>I&#8217;m tempted to argue that no camera <span style=\"font-style: normal;\">ever<\/span> made will <span style=\"font-style: normal;\">ever<\/span> be able to match the human eye. But as we know, bets about technology&#8217;s limits tend to be losing ones. For now, though, it&#8217;s true.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Furthermore, even the very best, most perfectly composed and lighted shot never seems quite so to the photographer&#8217;s eye (or to his editor&#8217;s, if it&#8217;s for publication somewhere). Modern cameras let you fire off hundreds of shots a minute, if you&#8217;d like, one right after the other&#8230; and not a single one may be perfectly &#8220;right.&#8221; The background changes, or the subject&#8217;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&#8217;s surprising, in fact, how much we&#8217;ve come to intuitively disregard the stuff in the margins of our attention.) Ansel Adams&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">All of which is to say: what you see in a photograph, no matter what the technology used to create it, it has <em>always<\/em> been subject to human manipulation. And for this reason, the human &#8220;manipulator&#8221; &#8212; the engineer who designed the camera and the worker who assembled it; the photographer; the editor; perhaps the gallery curator &#8212; 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 <em>team<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">So let&#8217;s go back to Chris Sutcliff&#8217;s anguished query: <em>how much is enough? how much is too much? have I even done &#8220;enough&#8221; yet?<\/em> Once you&#8217;ve clicked the shutter, once you&#8217;ve downloaded the image from your camera to your computer and opened it in the right software (whatever &#8220;right&#8221; means!), when do you stop tinkering with it? What&#8217;s the little bell in your head that goes &#8220;Ding!&#8221; when it&#8217;s just right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Enough&#8221;; &#8220;too much&#8221; &#8212; 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: <em>that person<\/em>&#8216;s decision at the final moment. Of course, not one of us is Michelangelo, Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, J.M.W. Turner, Georgia O&#8217;Keefe, or Laurie Anderson. But I&#8217;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&#8230; stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Me? I have no bell in my head. If I&#8217;m lucky, a photograph comes to resemble what I&#8217;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&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve got thousands of photos which would&#8217;ve been just fine if I&#8217;d ever come up with some satisfactory way of labeling them!) Some photos require barely a touch of &#8220;pizzazz&#8221;: a crop, say, or a very slight vignette effect. At the other extreme, some photos never look right at all to me until they&#8217;ve been run through a Chamber of Digital Photography Horrors.<\/p>\n\n\n<p style=\"margin-left: 30px; margin-right: 30px; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.25em;\"><em>In the latter case, they&#8217;ve often ended up in <a title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/explore\/tags\/jesstorypix\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a series tagged #jesstorypix<\/a>, captioned with micronarratives describing a dream or other fantastical series of events which the tortured photo suggests to me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<p>But even if I did have a bell in my head, and could describe it &#8212; or better yet, pull it out of my head and share it &#8212; it wouldn&#8217;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 <em>good enough<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe it&#8217;s not good enough for your preferred audience. But since you can&#8217;t (and I&#8217;d say <em>shouldn&#8217;t<\/em>) even try to poll them all for a consensus, you, and you alone, would still have to eventually throw the switch. And you&#8217;d probably never be able to explain to someone else why you&#8217;d done it then, not sooner or later. The best you can say is: <em>It was good enough<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[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 &#8220;manipulation&#8221; on my part; they happened in the camera itself. My involvement didn&#8217;t even click in until step (3). For some technical details, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3286,247,4701,250],"tags":[2352,4641,5155,5312,5313],"class_list":{"0":"post-24028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-obsessions","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-my-photography","9":"category-art","10":"tag-reality-vs-fiction","11":"tag-instagram","12":"tag-lightroom","13":"tag-chris-sutcliff","14":"tag-art-for-arts-sake-or-not","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-6fy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24028"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24090,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24028\/revisions\/24090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}