These Photos are Lies (and that’s great)
Matt Payne just wrote an interesting piece called Lying about Landscape Photography, which I really enjoyed and thought was spot on. He basically takes the ongoing fight about “manipulated photos” head on, and embraces people bringing out the best of an image, but then goes on to talk about the problem of people lying about the image in their discussion of it
“I don’t care at all that the work is created, I care that it is presented as a photograph representing truth, experience, and real beauty when in fact it doesn’t at all”
I was, at an earlier point in my career, a believer in not manipulating images and instead kept processing very straightforward and “realistic”. The problem is, the more I learn about digital imaging, the more I realize that the idea of what is “real” and isn’t in these arguments is far too arbitary and rarely based in factual concepts. It most of the time turns into “what I like is right”.
Over time, I’ve become much more interested in trying to find the best image hidden inside a capture, and not the image the camera easily presents to me as the one it thinks I should like. Most of my images today are still quite lightly processed, but certain specific ones catch my attention and I put more effort into finding the hidden jewel inside the pretty good starting point I see on my screen when I bring it up to edit.
Here are two images that were important in my changing my mind on what I feel is or isn’t appropriate to do to an image as part of the processing work.
Please note: I’m not in any way trying to tell you how you should be processing your images. These choices are individual and personal, and if you’re in the camp advocating more restrictive processing, and it works for you, that’s awesome. Most of my images are still done that way, and I think that’s what works best for them. There are those images, however, that can be transformed in very interesting and constructive ways and deserve them, and when I find those, they are the ones I put the extra effort into to bring out whatever special I see in them that the camera didn’t bring out in the capture.
Sunset at Sacramento Wildlife Refuge
Here’s one of my favorite non-bird (sort of) images ever taken on a Wildlife Refuge. I love the composition, and I think it really brings a mood of evening and the life and vitality that a wildlife refuge has when tens of thousands of birds take flight and turn the skies into a noisy, chaotic place.
That said, this image is lying in some ways. Here’s how the image looks straight out of camera.
It was taken at 1:30 in the after noon on a cold, dreary, overcast and very gray day. I was sitting in my car along the auto tour route, looking at that strip of color along the horizon and thinking to myself that the sunset was going to be a wash, that the color wouldn’t be even as interesting as it was at that moment (and in fact, I was right). I was curious if I could make something interesting of that light, so I spent about 20 minutes taking shots as the birds flew past me, and then we had this large flock go flying, and in the chaos, this image was the one that I really loved thanks to those foreground ducks. I knew before I drove away from the spot I was going to be doing a silhouette of those birds in the final image.
When I did the processing, I worked to black out the foreground elements and make that a frame in front of the sky and water. I decided it really felt like a sunset image, given the location of the color and the rather dark, gloomy day anyway, and when I pulled up the saturation, the colors exploded into the image.
There are two — maybe three — lies in this image. The primary lie is that it was hours from sunset when I took it; that said, it is exactly the kind of image I’d take at sunset if I were there at the right time and in better conditions. The second lie, which might also be a third lie as well, is about the color; the color that makes this image work for me wasn’t in the image until I made it visible by manipulating the saturation.
But…. Here’s the part that I think the “photo realism or it sucks” crowd ought to consider: the image that came out of the camera showed very little color, but the color was there, and in fact, the camera shows this as notably less colorful than it was in real life. Was it full of the strong and vibrant colors I put into my final version of the image? No, unfortunately. But at the same time, the scene as I saw it in real time wasn’t as bland and gray as the camera presented it either, so the camera is lying as well. Who’s right?
Is this image overly manipulated? Not in my mind; it’s an idealized version of the scene before me, but I iknow, because I’ve seen it, that color shows like this can and do happen there; it just didn’t happen at that moment. It’s an image that I would (and have) printed large and hung on my wall. It’s also an image that In wouldn’t submit to a contest that bans extensive manipulation, even though my sin of commission is pretty much an enthusiasm of the saturation knob.
To get a bit pendantic here, I didn’t add color to this image, I enhanced colors that were already there, but which were a lot less prounounced in real life, but which the camera actually subtracted out of the camera and under-represented. So if we are arguing about manipulating images, where does enhancing end and manipulating take over? is it okay to boost saturation but only to what I saw in real life? How do you draw the lines in the sand around a very subjective determination. How could anyone not there with me at the time tell me I’m wrong in my decisions? (and yet: people do, and probably will when they read this…).
That’s the challenge with “photo realism” in imagery, especially the landscapes. Yes, you can lie, and lie in very bad ways, in your choices while processing an image — but the camera also lies, and what it records and displays for you often doesn’t accurately represent when you saw while taking it. What’s the right level of processing for a given image depends entirely on the choices you make on every image every time you twirl a knob and push a lever.
Bandon Lighthouse
Here’s another sunset image, this one actually taken at sunset (7PM), of the Bandon Lighthouse in Bandon Oregon. It’s also an image that lies.
But… now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps all sunset images lie, in that our processing of them represent an idealization of the experience of watching it, and not really what it objectively was. But does it really matter?
Here’s that image straight out of camera.
This is an image I worked on pretty hard; I was only in Bandon for a couple of days visiting friends, and I picked up on the composition early and got myself back therefor a sunset shot with hopes, and the light simply fizzled, as sunsets often do. So where in the first image I can claim I was “merely” enhancing the light, here, the color is an addition to create a sunset I didn’t see; in reality, it was pretty blah. Another lie in this image, if you stop to look for it, is that it’s a long exposure image — 25 seconds, to smooth out the water and take the chaos and ripples out of it. It was actually kind of choppy with a bit of wind that day, but that’s a look that rarely improves an image like this.
So yeah, this image lies in a few ways, but I think it’s a great image because of the lies. Yes, I took what was a pretty mundane peachy-not-quite-salmon set of sunset skies and transformed them into pinks and purples, but the results, I think, speak for themselves. It is, again an image I’ve printed large and is on my wall proudly, that I’ve printed and given to a number of people, and which I think is one of my best.
Does it lie? yes. Does it matter? No, not to me. Again, I created an idealized version of the scene, not one that existed to my eyes in real time, but the end result is an image that really impacts people who look at it; it succeeds in ways the “non-manipulated” version of the image never would. And I think that’s what I am trying to do with every image I make visible to anyone other than me: create something that is appreciated and creates a memory of the scene for them. I see nothing wrong with that. That said, would I submit this image to a contest banning excessive manipulation? Nope. And that’s fine.
Fun story about this image: in 2019 I took a workshop from Art Wolfe in Olympic National Park (more here), and during one of the breaks, some of us were talking and showing off images to each other, and I happened to have this image up on my iPad when Art walked by. He got a step or so past us, and then stopped, backed up, looked at the image for a moment, and then said “very nice… where IS that?”
I gotta say, that one statement made the entire workshop worth the price, and I still smile when I remember that moment…
And in a way, I think it sums my thinking about images like these: are they good images? if the answer is yes, then the rest of the arguing is irrelevant. Do what you think should be done to bring out the best in the image. Everything else is simply attempting to push rules and gatekeep others, and I’m no longer interested in paying attention to that (unless you’re setting the rules of a photo contest or a publication). There is some truth that some manipulation of images is creating a lie, but the reality is the camera is also lying in how it captures an image, and which version of the image should be given priority?
I vote for the vision of the person, not the computer…
