Today’s post might be considered an unofficial part two of last Wednesday’s post Photography is What You Make of it because it’s all about making images using special effects, in this case using fewer manipulations than either of the auto-related mages shown in that post that the reader’s comments refers too,.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It’s just a piece of music.”—Richard Georg Strauss (1864-1949)
Late in his life, maestro Strauss was constantly being approached by adoring fans asking, “what is the story behind this music?” His reply is above. And much as Freud once noted, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” sometimes a photograph is just a picture.
I’ve always believed that photography was the universal language but that doesn’t mean that somewhere during these past 150 years we didn’t evolve a language all our own. And every now and then it changes. Sometime during the 1930’s, for example, the meaning of ‘burn’ and ‘dodge’ in the darkroom swapped places. I don’t know how or why that happened but it did. Even in these digital days, that language continues to evolve, for instance…
Making a Capture?
For reasons known only to Theia, the Greek goddess of sight and the shining light of the clear blue sky, some people have escalated the ubiquitous phrases “take a picture” or “make a photograph” by tossing around the current epithet of “nice capture” as a way of complimenting a photographer’s work as if they were out chasing butterflies with a net instead of searching for the light.
All of these thoughts popped into my head as I was pondering a comment that someone made about an image I posted on social media, asking if he could see the image “straight out of the camera.” Because, I am always glad to respond to reader requests, if I can, the original JPEG file. made before my RAW+JPEG regime. is shown at right.
The SOOC (straight out of the camera) movement is one I sort of understand but, to me, it seems akin to asking Ansel Adams to look at his negatives so they could compare it with his prints of “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome” to see if they couldn’t make a better print. My friend Mark Toal previously answered a similar reader question on our former blog this way:
“I worked in the photo processing industry for 30 years and almost every negative had some correction done to it. SOOC makes no sense to me. The original image is a starting point for me to make it my original creation… Just like when I shot film I want to be able to apply my own look to all of the images that I shoot. Most of the images you see from me have been sharpened slightly, had contrast added and color corrected to add more warmth.”
How I Made this image: I photographed this “living statue” who was standing in a fountain at the San Diego Zoo. The camera was a Canon EOS 30D with an EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens at 240mm with an exposure was 1/2500 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 320. I made several exposures with different in-camera cropping and shutter speeds try to get the look I wanted. All of those streams of water you see were manipulated in-camera simply by using a fast shutter speed. For the final version I slightly cropped it, then played around with the colors in this photograph using the Color Efex plug-in with its Bi-Color filter to add the color tones you see. I used the Eraser tool to keep some of the color on the water and not on the “statue.” Is all this manipulation? I suppose it is but not much different than what could have been accomplished with an appropriate Cokin filter (that I didn’t have with me at the time.)
Here’s My Take
I prefer the look of the final image and while there’s little about it that’s real, I think it fits the mood. You may disagree and that’s OK with me. My answer to this question is: After all this blather what are we left with? Today’s featured image is just a photograph I made because I have always believed that photography should be fun. And, to paraphrase Porky Pig, that’s all there is to it.
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