Photography

Two different posts on Gizmodo got me thinking about photography today, and so I went in search of some Ansel Adams quotes. These quotes and more can be found on Brainy Quotes.

• A good photograph is knowing where to stand.


• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

A college professor taught me the first part of this. He told a story about a student how came back from Summer Vacation. The student was excited about a photograph he had taken, and when the professor say it, he was not impressed. The student responded to the professor's lack of enthusiasm with...

"I guess you had to be there."

Next quote...

• A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

It seems rather inappropriate to add to any quote by Ansel Adams, but it seems to me that a great photograph also must express how you feel to the viewer. I am sure Ansel Adams would agree.

• There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Oh, it seems that he did.

• Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I think this may be changing, thanks to Photoshop.

• Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the first quote, and with the long experience of someone with an incredible eye for a good photograph.

• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

I went searching for the last quote below, but the other seemed appropriate to go with it.

• Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.


• The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

We sometimes get annoyed when we find that a photographer, or possibly just someone who found a picture, has altered that photo in some piece of software, and yet, what is photo software but a digital darkroom. I watched an interview with Ansel Adam's son where he talked about all the time that his father spent in the dark room correcting God's mistakes in tonal relationships.

Is it wrong to crop a photograph to make it better? What about the digital equivalent of dodging and burning? Obviously, Photoshop can do much more than this, but how much of what is done is just like the adjustments a photographer would make in creating a print from his negative?

It all started with this week's Shooting Challenge on Gizmodo. I followed the link to a blog about Black Card Photography and it mentioned that most photography contests will disqualify any photograph altered in Photoshop. But, I am betting that if you submit a print of a picture that you took with a film camera, that no one will complain if you massaged it in the darkroom.

This seems a little unfair.

Maybe, what is needed is a photo editing program that mimics only those techniques you can perform in a darkroom.