Colonial Gravestone

Beware of the demagoguery that comes from snobs.  For some time now I’ve heard or participated in discussions about the virtues of digital vs film.  It’s undeniable that both have unique places in photography and made great contributions to its art.  I’ve used both but more so digital as I entered a new stage of my development.  It is apparent that there’s a great deal of passion that surrounds each camp; however, the unfortunate by-product is a conceit that one is better than the other.  I submit it’s not an either/or debate, but rather which you prefer.  Digital has made too many advances to dismiss it as a technology fad.  Only yesterday I read a review about a medium format that comes with a digital back that’s 64 megapixels.  Just how many angels CAN we cram onto the head of a pin?  With the advances in digital resolution you merely have to “do the math” to realize there is no less information captured in a good digital camera than on film and with the power of post-processing we can extend it’s potential to realms heretofore unimagined.

On the other hand film has a richness and texture that’s unique.  In an earlier blog I mentioned Stephen Wilkes’s work at Ellis Island and he told us the night I saw his show all of it was done in film.  I have his book on my coffee table and thumb through it occasionally to remember just how wonderful his craft is and the medium he uses.  Both film and digital are terrific and give each photographer a way to express their vision;  however, for this discourse I will examine the validity of digital since this is the form in which I’ve found my greatest expression.

For insight to the fallacy of those who look down on digital we only have to look to the great masters whose art were considered garbage in their own lifetimes to see the disdain with which their new media were greeted.  Cézanne, a post-impressionist, was largely influential on artists of the twentieth century inspiring subsequent forms such as cubism.  However, in his lifetime his contemporaries as well as the general public largely discredited him.  In the mid to late 1860s the prestigious Salon regularly rejected his works at their annual exhibition that was organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts then the leading art academy.

For years I never liked Jackson Pollock’s work and I wasn’t alone in that view.  His paintings have confounded critics and still generate polarizing debates.  But as time passed and my own art matured I came to realize his brilliance. The tools of his trade were unlike any that had preceded him. He used hardened brushes, sticks, basting syringes as paint applicators and even a two by four in a moment of frustration.  His paints were mixed to a fluid viscosity so that he could drip it onto a loosely laid canvas beneath him allowing the application of paint from all directions.  Few had done that before opting to use stretched canvases on erect eye-level easels painted with oils and brushes applied with the hand and wrist from essentially one viewing direction.  He popularized a new medium called action painting now in wide scale use today.

When I hear pundits extol the exclusive virtue of film and denigrate digital photography, I’m amazed at how many of them assert themselves as Ansel Adams’s students.  With all that teaching when did Mr. Adams ever find the time for his photography? 😉  A mentor of mine once taught me that whenever I’m stuck for an idea or solution to call upon the memory of my heroes, but if they aren’t contemporaries place them in my current time with all of the technology and resources available and then wonder what they might have done. What do you suppose Ansel Adams would have done on the eve of 2010 if he were just starting his craft?  You bet.  He’d be using one of those miraculous digital computers with a lens turning his Zone System into digital darkroom techniques that none of us have yet imagined.  At the risk of being branded a crass street urchin I submit that if a young Mozart were alive today we’d be hearing unparalleled Rock and Jazz and NOT Classical Style.  Remember it was Mozart who rejected the convention of his day, Style Galant and before that Baroque.  So it’s the innovators that stand on the shoulders of their predecessors bringing art to a new and oftentimes ridiculed levels before the world realizes their genius.

Recently I attended a session at a nearby camera club lead by Shamik Ganguly.  Shamik is an extremely talented young photographer not constrained by convention whose developed a personal style using Lightroom and Photoshop to extend the beauty of his art.  I recommend you look in on his work and read about the methods he uses.  It isn’t trickery or banal.   As he says, “I develop a vision of how I want an image to look even before I take the photo and then use the digital darkroom to create what I saw in my mind.”  That’s art my friends, not digital manipulation, no less inspiring than when Monet looked at his pond and saw ethereal water lilies and created them on canvas.

Here’s a pretty mediocre shot of a golf course. There’s nothing in it other than the house to create interest for the viewer and since the house is in the distance and obscured by the trees, even it looses interest. That leaves only the skinny almost unrecognized flag on the green. Pretty bad shot!

From a separate photo I created a layer of the doe and placed her into the left foreground creating interest for the eye to catch, but she looks artificial, almost floating above ground. She could be made to look natural, but is it worth it? I think not. It leaves the image looking stilted and made up. This is a commonplace application contributing to the pop-culture expression, "that's been Photoshopped."

Such an image should be presented honestly and not pretend that the deer was there when she wasn’t.  Unlike the unsophisticated composite above,the  digital darkroom’s potential can be used in ways that make the photographer more like an artist.  Layers and masks, filters and contrast tones, opacity and flow are the modern versions of paints, “brushes, sticks, basting syringes” and two by fours. Just like the painter’s studio, the digital darkroom has all of the tools the photographer needs to create art.

I’ll demonstrate using a very simple image for a basic illustration giving you an idea how we can create something better than the native photo.  Keep in mind that far more intricate and stunning results can be achieved with extensive applications of Photoshop than in this example.  Let’s start with a poorly contrasted image and try to bring it to where I saw it before I took the picture.

As a short diversion let me describe why this shot intrigued me and how I saw it before it was taken.  I am an enthusiastic but amateur student of how the United States began.  The American Revolution is its centerpiece, the pivotal moment in history when government for the American people and eventually the world was redefined.  When I see colonial artifacts they conger a primitive and simpler America.  The earliest years of the revolution were it’s bleakest with almost certain defeat by the British lurking only one more battle away. It was those who “stood the wall” that sacrificed their homes, their farms, crops, the closeness of loved ones, often frost bite and starvation that touch me most.  What kept them dedicated to their cause given all of the deprivations they had to endure?

I took this shot during the first snowfall of 2008, and as I passed the statue marveled at how the snow put into context those uncertain times. I wondered that this was the way they looked in battle in the horrible winters of 1776, 77, and 78.  It was as though I was looking back through an astral wormhole into a past that had weathered with time. When I got home and opened the file I got what you see .  Pretty bland.

I went to work in Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw.  There are considerable numbers of adjustment layers and associated masks that I created so I won’t cover them all in detail.  For those not familiar with one of Photoshop’s strongest features a simple explanation is each adjustment layer with an associated mask can isolate a specific area of the image allowing you to enhance it to suit your particular preference.  I’ll show you examples below.

The image above is one example of the adjustment layering technique.  The step I took resides somewhere towards the top of my workflow as you’ll note from the blue highlighted layer in the lower right.  Again for those not familiar with Photoshop, the order of priority for each action goes from bottom to top as though you are laying a transparent plastic sheet on top of the one beneath so that you can paint changes without altering the one below. Eventually you wind up with 5, 6, 7 or more layers of “clear plastic” all of which you can look through to view the combined effects of all.  It is much the same way Disney cartoons were created before the advent of computers. You can see the many layers and masks I applied.  The illustration above is merely an example in a series of actions of how a paintbrush [Photoshop hasn’t invented the two by four tool yet, :-)] masks and isolates a portion of the image, in this case the tree behind the Minuteman that I wanted to darken.

If I go back to the beginning of my post processing (note the highlighted blue in the lower right) you’ll see I first isolated the statue before working on the background to bring out contrast and some isolated color using the curves and channel mixer.

There isn’t a lot of color on an overcast day in a bronze statue so instead of trying to draw out the green patina, I gave it a near monochrome look as though it was the silhouette of a real person by “pushing” the blues.  I did this with the channel mixer adjustment layer.

After that I wanted an ancient look to the the fore- and background. To do this I created a sepia look with the Curves Adjustment Layers.  I don’t much like the sepia defaults that Photoshop offers and have found I can create a richer golden tone by adjusting the separate RGB curve channels myself (refer to Sepia Tone blog).

The advantage of this method is you, not the software, decides how you want to blend your sepia.  Not enough red?  Pump it up a bit.  Too much red?  Tone it down.  More golden hue?  Increase your yellows by dropping your Blue Channel curve.

Lastly I isolated the statue once again and gave it a strong sharpening in “Unsharp Mask” to bring out the hardened metal appearance.

But it still lacked that feel of a bygone day so I moved it over to Adobe Camera Raw and vignetted the edges to create that “through the looking glass” feel.

And now I saw the same poorly dressed man, braced against the snow, preparing for battle against General Howe’s troops as he stood-the-wall for the sake of liberty.

Could you have done this with film?  Maybe. After all Photoshop is merely an extension of what was laboriously done with processing sinks, trays, red lit darkrooms, proof sheets, specialized papers, toxic chemicals, dodging and burning tools, an enlarger and all of it was a darn site costlier. From the enlarger you could enhance contrast with careful exposure to the highlight areas that would print too light, called printing-in or burning.  You could also mask projected light onto your emulsions from areas that would otherwise be too dark called dodging bringing out details in the shadows.  You could vignette a print by projecting the negative’s image through a board with an oval cutout.  Interesting prints were made using texture screens applying a specialized filtered look like a charcoal-style drawing or linen cloth. Combination printing layered one or more negatives merging two pleasing images into one composition controlling the opacity of one over the other so that the results blended well.  Hue and saturation could be manipulated with the enlarger’s filters to pop colors that excited the eye.  Do any of these terms sound familiar and aren’t they measurably easier to do in the digital darkroom?

By comparison digital photography makes it possible to use an untold number of extensions first done by film photographers. Today you can expand your dynamic range as Shamik Ganguly does in his wonderful imagery, or create selective focus like Kathleen Clemons in her magical Lens Baby photos, or even capture extreme tone and light differences converting them into a single image as David Nightingale accomplishes with High Dynamic Range Imagery.  The advantages of digital photography are endless and will only get better with time and I for one am waiting for the next Cézanne, Pollack, Adams, or Mozart.  I only hope I have the wisdom to know it when I see them and count them on my list of heroes.

Ron Landis