The Digital Photo Experience

Over 15 years ago, I first saw the potential of Photoshop — I saw it as a potential return to the classic techniques of the Ansel Adams darkroom, but too many people simply saw it as a way to move pyramids or clone hot-air balloons flying under Delicate Arch, and nature photographers were either appalled or scared. Photographing nature has been important to me since I was a kid, and I even majored in Plant and Soil Science in college.

As editor of Outdoor Photographer magazine during the transition to digital, I used to get really nasty letters about how bad I was for leading photographers astray simply because we were reporting on digital photography. I became an expert in Photoshop and all things digital not because I liked computers, but because I felt this was the future and I did not want it to be held hostage by computer geeks. If I was going to help photographers understand the technology, I had to understand it myself as a photographer, a nature photographer.

Today, digital photography is the main way all photographers shoot, including nature photographers. While Photoshop holds an unwarranted mystique among photographers, Lightroom finally came out as a program designed from scratch for photographers (unlike Photoshop). I feel that Lightroom is the best program for photographers today, bar none. It is easier, more intuitive and faster than Photoshop. It also makes your photos the star of the work, not the program.

Now here’s the challenge and the reason for the title of this blog entry — a lot of nature photographers, including some pros, believe they are being purists by never processing an image in the computer. While it is true that some of these folks are intimidated by Photoshop (for good reason) and have never actually used Lightroom (which they should), the reason given by most is that nature is perfect therefore they simply need a good camera and can get a perfect photo.

That is actually a barrier to getting a better photograph and can lead to images that do not accurately represent the real world. While nature may be perfect, a photograph of nature is not the same thing as nature. A photograph is not perfect just because it has a perfect subject. You cannot stuff nature into a two-dimensional, frozen image. You can only interpret it. It is not possible to do anything else.

But the nature-is-perfect folks say that doesn’t matter. The camera is a “pure” instrument and captures the real nature without frills. Does it really? If that were true, you could simply set your camera on totally automatic and point the camera at the scene, take the picture, and you have a great shot. Not so much, right? As photographers, we must interpret that scene in terms of focal length chosen, shutter speed selected, f-stop used, white balance set (even if you shoot auto white balance and RAW, a white balance is set), angle to the subject, timing of the shot, and of course, composition.

Then the camera goes to work. The camera is set up to create a compromise (not compromised) interpretation of the world based on the limitations of the sensor and the usually male Japanese engineers who designed the camera. Their job is not to create a camera that gives you the best possible photo of the scene in front of you — they will probably never see that scene or anything like it. Their job is to create a camera that will interpret any and all scenes and subjects that all kinds of photographers from around the world will shoot. That interpretation must be usable by all, meaning it is a compromise — by definition, something that must work well for everyone can never be perfect for anyone.

One of the most common problems is that blacks must be set too high for the best images. They are set high to make the resulting image easier to process (this is always true for RAW, although you can set up a camera to change this with JPEG). Unfortunately, that often means weak blacks and muddy dark tones without good definition if no processing is done. I see this all the time and it weakens photos, proving that the photograph is an imperfect rendering of a perfect nature.

Most digital images need to have some processing. That is why I love Lightroom so much. It connects me with my photos and allows me to spend less time on processing. It is actually fun to gain the best interpretation of the image to more accurately reflect the nature I originally photographed.

LIFE photographer Andreas Feininger once said that the uncontrolled image is a lie and that only when the photographer exerts some control over how the photograph is interpreted can it be truthful (a photographer can control the image to make it lie, too). He wrote this forty years ago, well before computers. All photos are interpretations of the world. It is up to us to control that interpretation to make it true to nature or false.