ESFotoClix Blog

I received two terrific presents for my birthday and Christmas. The first, “Ansel Adams in Color” is a terrific book that details a little known side of the master, his sporadic and for him, less than satisfactory forays into what was at his time the nascent field of color photography. The second treat, a PBS “American Experience” DVD, gave me a moving, at times powerful look into Adams’ life. I strongly recommend both of these works as they go beyond the mere exposition of photos, providing us thought-provoking glimpses into Adams’ creative process and approach to the art.

I’ll take up his forays into color in future articles, and will now focus a little more into the biographical DVD presentation. First I’ll highlight an objection some may pose: the account divides its scope, in nearly equal parts to Adams the photographer and his involvement in environmental endeavors. If you want a pure photography lesson or a purely artistic treatment of his life, you may be disappointed. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. It is after all a biography. By focusing on the activist part of his life, and making the connection between his love for nature photography and his love for the environment, we get a rounder, more complete perspective of Adams as a person — even if the point is made that Adams never explicitly purposed his photography to serve his environmental causes.

Before I go on, I’ll also mention a rather glaring omission: no mention of his invention or contribution(s) to the definition of the Zone System? Maybe I need to watch the DVD again.

Where the DVD truly shines is in its portrayal of a life devoted to an art form. The compelling score matches the majesty Adams’ photographs captured. Along the way, we are treated to how Adams evolved as a photographer, how he approached his subject matter, and the tremendous work ethic he applied to his art. Of particular interest to me was the amount of time Ansel Adams spent in the dark room, up to a day, we are told, to perfect a print, or rather, to enforce his vision upon it — an interesting observation for those who want the nearly instantaneous click and processing in our cameras to comprise the totality of what we do to achieve a photograph.

I’ll stop here to strongly encourage you to go online and order this DVD. If you love nature photography as much as I do and appreciate Ansel Adams’ body of work, you’ll enjoy this presentation.

Kevin Maney’s recent book, Trade-Off : Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, points out how products that succeed usually fall at one end or the other of the Fidelity vs. Convenience spectrum. Maney gives the example of music, where a live performance is expensive and inconvenient to access, but gives the greatest fidelity as far as sound quality and musical experience are concerned. MP3s, on the other hand, give low fidelity but are extremely portable and user friendly, i.e., convenient. The author goes on to point out that either of these extremes is fairly successful: people still pay through the nose to go to concerts, while others download MP3s by the ton. CDs and DVD-As fall somewhere in between, and while they ticked for a while (actually DVD-As never really took off, and CDs used to be the convenience kings), now they’re on their way out.

Apply this to photography and the RAW vs. JPG question, and what do you have? Fidelity vs. Convenience, respectively. Each format will continue to succeed on its own accord. RAW brings along the maximum amount of information, and so long as you edit it in the right tool, the ability to make incremental and reversible changes. On the negative side, they’re a pain to manage. They’re not portable (in the sense of cross-application support) without moderate effort, editing them is usually slow, and they occupy a great deal of disk space. Then there’s the big gotcha: no Web browser displays them directly.

JPGs on the other hand are extremely portable, and for most applications, offer sufficient fidelity. Start editing and/or saving them repeatedly, however, and fidelity drops off. At the end of the day 2 to the 8th power (for 8-bit JPGs) will not hold as much color/shade data as 2 to the 12th or 2 to the 14th power in RAW files. Lossy JPG compression further diminishes quality. But JPGs win on convenience by a long shot. They are recognized by any software application that wasn’t written more than 20 years ago (okay, I exaggerate) and are terrific for Web display and networked transmission.

Middle of the road formats such as TIF (full 16-bit) or PNG (8-bit, but not lossy) are useful under some applications, but end up being wishy-washy about things like storage size, EXIF inclusion, and/or image quality, and therefore enjoy moderate success and acceptance.

Which to pick? It’s up to you whether convenience or fidelity holds the greatest value. Personally, after shooting out-of-camera (OOC) JPGs for 2 months, and giving RAW a try one day, I could never go back. The flexibility I gained over pre-canned or even customizable in-camera settings and algorithms was too great for me to pass up. Why would I want, for instance, to control sharpness in my images in a rough 0-9 scale, when I can address each image’s need, even going as far as to apply sharpening to special areas of an image with Unsharp Mask techniques? Why would I want to do likewise with saturation, hue, and contrast settings, or even pre-programmed custom curves that would apply to all my images, rather than adjust these parameters in fine-tunable, granular increments on a per image basis to support that image’s needs and my vision for it?

Is all of that post-processing tweaking convenient? By no means. It amounts to paying a handsome price for concert tickets and fighting crowds and rush hour traffic to get there. But oh, the music you can make.

Including a pathway in your image often helps as a handle to the viewer, providing an entry point into the image as well as a guide through it. The simplest example is that of straight lines, among which, strong diagonals are my favorite.

In this example, I framed at least one of these as a strong diagonal that starts at one corner of the frame and takes the viewer to the background, the photo’s punchline, where all the drama is taking place between those mountains and stormy sky. Notice how along the way, the strong diagonal component lends a dynamic feel to the image, even though nothing’s moving.

A variation on the theme happens when we use curves rather than straight lines. The S-curve stands as the most typical use of curved leading lines, as this next sample shows. Here, again, the point is to guide the viewer to the mountains and sky, and here, too, I chose to start the curve at the corner of the frame, a favorite trick of mine to create a more dynamic feel.

Of course there’s nothing that says that rather than leading the viewer to the distant background, one cannot instead portray a journey where the subject — leaf autumn color, in this next example — is all around the path.

Notice how for all three images I avoided standing in the middle of the pathway, and in fact chose to shoot from one side of it. You will see images of roads, for instance, where the photographer stood on the center line. Aside from being an accident waiting to happen, I find such shots mildly compelling but somewhat static. Shot from one side of the road or path, the image becomes less symmetrical, and the imbalance (sometimes balanced by something else on the opposite side) creates a more dynamic feel. (Hmm, how many times can I say “dynamic feel” in one article?) Try using pathways in your photographs and see how it works for you.