| The Making of a Photograph Cindy Chadwick all text copyrighted C. Chadwick 2007 A man once remarked that he was, “surprised to discover that all these beautiful photographs I’d been seeing—with all these really rich, beautiful colors—they’d been enhanced with a computer. I thought they were au natural.” I laughed and told him that no developed photograph is ‘au natural’. The photographs of greats such as Ansel Adams are not photos simply shot and developed assembly-line fashion. That’s what the whole dark room was about—making adjustments to things like the image’s contrast and exposure in order to produce a sharper, more artistic photograph. Not even the snapshots you take at home and develop at your local CVS or Wal-Mart are ‘au natural’. The photo developing machines make auto-corrections to your photographs—adjusting such things as color and brightness—to produce a more beautiful photograph. But a machine does not know what your subject matter looked like or what kind of light was shining on it. So its adjustments amount to programmed ‘guesses’ about what your photograph should look like. If you shot something indoors under lights that cast a yellowish tint on your subject, the machine may not correct for this, so your photograph will not look the way your subject looked to you when you shot it. (Our brains ‘auto-correct’ for us, so without a trained eye, we do not see the yellow pall created by many indoor lights, but our camera does and records it.) Whether or not the warm tint to the photograph in this example is an enhancement or detraction depends on the subject matter and the interpretation of the viewer…it’s an artistic decision. With the modern personal computer, the photographer can now do on a computer all the things once done in a dark room. The photographer still does what he/she has always done—makes adjustment choices based on what will yield the most artistic image: Leave in the yellow tint to produce a softer, more romantic look, take out the yellow tint to produce an ‘as the eye sees it’ look; brighten that shadowy area to reveal what is within it, leave it dark to create a mood of mystery; boost the contrast to create a more graphic look, lessen the contrast to create a more dreamy, surreal feeling… So, the modern photographer still maintains complete control of the final image…without being confined to a small, closed room with potent chemical fumes! It is like going from writing a book on a typewriter to writing one on a computer…same effect, different tools. Author/photographer still supplies the content, creativity, originality and artistic style. |
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