Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It’s just a piece of music.”—Richard Strauss
Late in his life 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 along these 150 years we didn’t evolve a language of 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. Don’t know how or why that happened but it did.
Make a Capture?
And 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 “take a picture” or “make a photograph” argument by tossing around the epithet “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 this popped into my head as I was pondering a comment made about one of my images I posted on social media when a commenter asked if he could see the image ‘straight out of the camera.” The SOOC (straight out of the camera) movement is one that I kind of understand but, to me, seems akin to asking Ansel Adams to look at his negatives so they could compare it with his prints of “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” to see why he couldn’t just make a straight print. My friend Mark Toal previously answered this 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.”
My Take
My answer to this question is: After all this blather what are we left with? Today’s featured image is just a photograph that I made because I have always believed that photography should be fun. And, to paraphrase Porky Pig, that’s all there is to it.
How I Made this Shot: I photographed this “living statue” at the San Diego Zoo using a 8.2-megapixel Canon 30D with EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens at 240mm. Exposure was 1/2500 sec (to freeze the water) at f/5.6 and ISO 320. The JPEG Image (made before my RAW+JPEG regimen) was processed in Color Efex using the Bi-Color and Glamour Glow filters.
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