August 31, 2009...........................................................................HOME........................................................"Taking Vs Making Photographs"
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There’s taking pictures and there’s making photographs. The difference is night and day. Anyone can take a picture with an automated camera and be relatively assured of a sharp, well exposed result. Of course the content of the picture is another story, and herein lies the art of making photographs.
Edward Weston once described the art of making photographs as the process of understanding the capacities of your equipment and techniques so well that as you study a subject, instinct guides selection and utilization of the technology (lenses, camera settings, development, etc.), to realize the image envisioned. Photographers working at this level are the artists whose images resonate with the viewer, and inspire other photographers to strive for excellence.
Even after you understand the concept, it’s difficult to pull together in your own work. When I teach workshops in the field, we try to encourage participants to exhaust their imagination and the equipment at hand. Over time your imagination gains endurance and with advancing technical mastery more options begin to pop into your creative consciousness. But since there is no substitute for seeing real world examples, this post will give you an insight into challenges I faced recently during a shoot.
I’m not really a portrait photographer, but was asked recently to do portraits for executives of a small business. Bread and butter stuff: heads and a group shot. I set the lighting up in my studio with seamless paper, a large soft box as the main light, and a small remote strobe to splash some light on the seamless background. Three of the four individuals were easy as pie to shoot, but the fourth person wore glasses. All four portraits needed similar pose and lighting for consistency, so I didn’t have the option of changing the light angle or subject position as a solution to avoiding the horrendous reflections in the lenses of his glasses (see picture 1). Trying to remove the reflections from a single capture in Photoshop would be a nightmare. But understanding the capabilities of layers in Photoshop allowed me to use a very simple technique for a very advanced result. I simply told the person not to move, reached up and took off his glasses, and took several frames of his bare face. Once in Photoshop, all I had to do was process the two files the same way, and then drop the two images into the same file on separate layers. I applied a black mask to hide the top frame (bare face) and then used a paintbrush loaded with white to paint in the area within his lenses, revealing the bare face. The effect is amazing and was lightening fast to apply.
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Edward Weston once described the art of making photographs as the process of understanding the capacities of your equipment and techniques so well that as you study a subject, instinct guides selection and utilization of the technology (lenses, camera settings, development, etc.), to realize the image envisioned. Photographers working at this level are the artists whose images resonate with the viewer, and inspire other photographers to strive for excellence.
Even after you understand the concept, it’s difficult to pull together in your own work. When I teach workshops in the field, we try to encourage participants to exhaust their imagination and the equipment at hand. Over time your imagination gains endurance and with advancing technical mastery more options begin to pop into your creative consciousness. But since there is no substitute for seeing real world examples, this post will give you an insight into challenges I faced recently during a shoot.
I’m not really a portrait photographer, but was asked recently to do portraits for executives of a small business. Bread and butter stuff: heads and a group shot. I set the lighting up in my studio with seamless paper, a large soft box as the main light, and a small remote strobe to splash some light on the seamless background. Three of the four individuals were easy as pie to shoot, but the fourth person wore glasses. All four portraits needed similar pose and lighting for consistency, so I didn’t have the option of changing the light angle or subject position as a solution to avoiding the horrendous reflections in the lenses of his glasses (see picture 1). Trying to remove the reflections from a single capture in Photoshop would be a nightmare. But understanding the capabilities of layers in Photoshop allowed me to use a very simple technique for a very advanced result. I simply told the person not to move, reached up and took off his glasses, and took several frames of his bare face. Once in Photoshop, all I had to do was process the two files the same way, and then drop the two images into the same file on separate layers. I applied a black mask to hide the top frame (bare face) and then used a paintbrush loaded with white to paint in the area within his lenses, revealing the bare face. The effect is amazing and was lightening fast to apply.
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Next came the group shot. The client wanted an informal ambience, and removed his suit coat to back things off a notch. The problem was he’d been wearing his shirt all day. It was quite wrinkled. Now, if I had two or three assistants, we could have had the shirt ironed or had another for a clothing change. But this wasn’t a fashion shoot, nor did the clients want to waste time. So it was shoot first, find solutions later. I tried several post processing techniques to reduce the shirt wrinkles before realizing big problems require bold solutions. Normally I would never think of using the Gaussian Blur filter at a radius setting so high it would render the image totally blurred without any detail, but one quick experiment proved it was just the virtual iron I needed. Once again I used a new layer, copying the man in need, wrinkles and all. Then I hopelessly blurred the layer til the fabric was nothing more than a smooth blur. I applied a black layer mask, hiding everything, and then went to work with the white paint brush again, revealing the blur everywhere on his shirt where there were offending wrinkles. I avoided all the seams in the fabric, collar, etc. Since the mind sees these and registers them as sharp, it just assumes the fabric is sharp and smooth too.
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As I was wrapping up processing of the group shot, and was almost ready to mail the image to the client, I looked objectively and saw a small problem and a big problem, both extremes of the same hurdle: the wide range of height among the individuals. The tallest man was close to 7’. He was so tall the only way to fit him in the frame was to put him in back, several feet behind the others. The shortest man was about 5’ 7”, but he looked quite small among present company. They all needed to fit in the same frame and I suddenly realized the range in perspective was very unflattering. People often don’t know what they want to look like in a portrait, but everyone knows what they don’t like as soon as they see the photo. The shot was done. What could I do to salvage it?
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The answer again lay within the use of layers and masks (are you getting the idea that this is so important a tool for the digital photographer that you simply must get comfortable using them). Using the marquee tool, I selected and copied each man to his own layer. I then selected the contents of each layer and applied the transform tool, one of the options of which is to allow scaling of the selection. The tall man in the back looked very small because of his distance to the camera, so I scaled him up until his head size approximated those of the other subjects. This moved his body lower in the frame but that was an acceptable tradeoff as his body was already blocked by those in front. The short man on the left was handled in similar fashion, scaled up with the transform tool, and then placed at an appropriate height in the frame. A divergence from reality? Absolutely. But for the purposes of a commercial ad, a winning solution that left client pleased, with all four subjects rendered “normally”.
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Although Edward Weston never envisioned the techniques that photographers today would use to craft their images, the take home message of his comment still rings true. Your finest image will come from your creative understanding of the tools and techniques available. Practice, learn, and explore. Your images will soar along with your satisfaction as a photographic artist.
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