Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

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Where the Road Leads
I love to explore. Wandering and discovering is a great joy to me. I like to find out where the road leads.
The road
The title is Where the Road Leads. This is not accidental. Most of my exploration now is near to roads.
Way back when I had a lot less miles on me, I enjoyed exploring “the wild.” Taking trails in the mountains or sometimes making trails where there were none was my preference (don’t tell the Forest Service or National Park Services). I longed to believe I had found places no one else had ever set foot on, photographing sights never seen. Sometimes, that was probably true;
Now, most of my exploring is on roads. I do my photography out of the car, with few long hikes. Age does that to us. I’m not sorry. I enjoy my current explorations as much as I did climbing mountains.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
No agenda
A key to my enjoyment is carving out a block of time with no agenda. Being on someone else’s schedule kills my freedom.
It is hard to get immersed in my photography when I know a clock is ticking away my time. I feel pressured to go too fast and “run and gun” my shooting. under time pressure, I often convince myself that this scene is not “good enough.” I must hurry on to find a better one. Sure, there are magic light times when great shots seem to be everywhere, and I am in a photographic frenzy. But that is dictated by the conditions, not by a clock.
My wife and I enjoy taking river cruises in Europe. It is an activity that generally pleases both of us. But the time is structured. That is hard on me. I can sometimes step away from the group for a few minutes and shoot something interesting. But it is hit and miss.
A compromise is that we sometimes go a week or more early to give me time to free explore some new area. That has been awesome for my spirit and for my photography. Even if I don’t get portfolio shots, it is refreshing and puts me in a better mood for the cruise.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Open to discovery
Just wandering is not the same as open to discovery. Some people wander when they are lost in thought or worried about something. This makes them inward focused and not open to discovery.
Being open to discovery is an attitude. It is based on curiosity and rooted in hope. Hope is a forward-looking attitude where we believe good things are yet to come. The attitude of discovery tells us there are interesting things around if we are sufficiently open to find and recognize them;
I have always had this attitude to some extent, but at one period in my life I got some good training. Once upon a time, we owned a timeshare. This was back when they were a pretty good deal. It was very good for us for several years. We had a premium week – prime ski season in Colorado – and we could trade it well. We always traded.
But we discovered there was an unexpected side to the transaction. We traded for a week somewhere. They were nice places. Usually a golf resort way out in remote areas. After we saw the obvious sights, we were stuck with what to do with the rest of the week. I don’t play golf.
We developed an active exploration ability. I don’t think there was any location where we didn’t fill up our time completely and were sad to leave after only a week. I typically would get the best map available and would try to find remote, out of the way sights. Or even just the roads less traveled. It was wonderful.
The few years we did this was excellent training in learning to be open to discovery.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Stop and look
But even looking and recognizing interesting scenes is only partially useful if we are zipping by them at 70 mph. Convince yourself it is OK to stop. Even to turn around and go back. This is a hard sell in our modern, fast paced world. There might be wails of protest in the car.
Too bad. They won’t die. Interesting discoveries are worth spending some time.
Go actually look at it. I’m not talking about jumping out of the car, shooting a selfie by something, and zooming off. Spend some time. React to it photographically. Let your creativity play.
You may have come on some historical place you didn’t know about. Or an overlook opening a sight you had never seen. Maybe it is just a little out-of-the-way museum or gift shop or an art display in someone’s front yard.
Stop. Spend some time. Enough to contemplate it a bit. It can take some time to let some discoveries sink in. You spent the time to discover it, give yourself some time to take it in.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Paying attention
As Peter Cripps eloquently put it recently, it is not necessarily about the photographs. The act of paying attention is more important. Creatively putting ourseves into the artistic process of finding a photographic subject, capturing it well, and editing and perfecting it feeds our artistic spirit.
In some cases, we don’t even care about the final image. I have tens of thousands of images that I never look at and will never show anyone. But I feel they were useful to me to make them. And maybe to keep to remember an event or a place or where some road took me.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Where the road leads
It is important to me to find out where the road leads. To follow it to places I have never discovered. But why?
I believe this is an attitude and act of curiosity and creativity. I believe it helps to keep my mind active and growing. And in my photography, I greatly prefer interesting pictures of places no one had ever paid much attention to instead of overworked images of classic icons. It keeps me fresh. It is why I pick up my camera and go out to shoot.
Slow down. Block out unstructured time to explore and shoot. Follow roads you have never traveled before. Stop when you see something interesting. This is art.
November 11, 2026
Instant Replay
Editing is a pain. It is a big time sink. But I have begun to look at it in a more positive way. Often, editing is an instant replay of a significant event or image.
Time
People say digital photography is free. I dispute that. Although it does not cost a fixed amount per frame to shoot, each frame incurs a debt of time. When I come back from an outing with several hundred images, it takes a long time to go through them.
I have said that I deliberately use a process of slow editing. It is an advantage to me overall, but it has costs. Let’s say I drive an hour somewhere to shoot, spend a couple of hours making images, and drive home. It might take me easily a couple of days or more to go through these images on the computer. And even after that, I often do not have what I consider the “final” edits of some of the images.
So, it doesn’t cost me $1 a frame to shoot, so I am “free” to shoot as many as I want. But instead, the cost is many hours of editing time. Maybe I’m just slow.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Stuck at a computer
And a complaint I often hear (including from myself) is that I’m stuck at my computer doing the edits when I would rather be out shooting. Well, yes, that is true. But the computer is where a significant part of our workflow happens now.
Ansel Adams famously described that exposing a frame is only a start of the process. In his world, much time and effort went into developing the negatives and making the prints. Spending 8 hours making 1 print was not unheard of for him. Now days, that extra time and effort is generally spent on our computer rather than in a wet darkroom.
As I mentioned, I find that culling, keywording, initially processing the keepers, grading, and sorting take far more time than exposing an image. That is without even doing the extra work to perfect a “final” image.
Every time I press the shutter, I am incurring a debt. That debt will be paid in processing time at my computer. I understand this and accept it as part of the process.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Not creating
Some people also object that editing on the computer is not a creative process. I can see where they are coming from. It seems much more satisfying to be out in the field shooting. I am starting to view it somewhat differently, though.
I only shoot RAW images, so my pictures look flat and soft when they come into the computer. The process of guiding and forming the image into my vision for it has become interesting to me. I also recognize it as a significant part of the creativity of making a good picture.
There is a reinforcing loop between my knowledge of the tools and the results I achieve with them. Learning more rewards me with more confidence and ability to creatively modify the images.
So, I have taught myself to enjoy the computer work as not just a necessary evil, but a creative part of my photographic process. A huge photo shoot may overwhelm me and seem burdensome, but overall, editing is a necessary and creative part of being a photographer with our current technology.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Disappointing
I said that my photos do not look good when I first load them into the computer. This can be disappointing.
Experience can help immensely. I know from experience that when I go out shooting, I can capture some good images, if my head is in it. Likewise, I know from experience that these ugly duckling images I first see on my screen can blossom into something much better.
Some creative work in my image processing software makes them develop into something much closer to what I remember (or imagine) from the shoot. In most cases, the disappointment fades and the images start taking on a life of their own.
© Ed Schlotzhauer
Invokes memories
But I called this “instant replay”. What did it mean? Going back over the images from a shoot brings me back into the event. I relive what I was feeling, what the weather felt like, the sights and sounds and smells I experienced there.
Memory is very selective. Usually, we remember the good parts. Reviewing the overall shoot is a great reinforcement to my memory and a chance to relive it. Usually in a positive way.
This is important to me, because as I progress through my editing process, the images tend to get sorted into different bins, independent of the trip or the event. For instance, a picture of a really great tree ceases to be so much “a picture of a great tree in northern Louisiana in the fall of 2026.” Instead, it ends up in a collection of good tree images. This is the way I ultimately will be using the image.
The passes through the shoot before they are extensively culled and binned is my opportunity to reexamine the event and build memories of the group as a whole. I am not entirely callous about this, though. Occasionally a trip is meaningful enough for me to put together a collection of highlights to remember it. I have a few of these.
Going back through one of these trip collections is a great way to jog my memory. It can be interesting to me to see not only the trip, but what was catching my. eye at the time, and it can be instructive to examine how I have changed and developed different tastes now, whenever “now” is.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
This is where it comes together
I am not a big sentimentalist. I don’t spend much time looking back over past trips and thinking about the “good ‘ole days.” It amazes me, though, when I do look at a past trip, how my images cause the memories to flood back. It is like I am there again.
Perhaps this is one reason I shoot so much. My images are a big part of my memories. It seems like seeing an image that is important to me will immediately bring me into context. I recall where it was, when it was, the circumstances around it, why I was drawn to it, what the weather was, and why I like it,
This is not a trivial thing to me. It shows what a powerful force the images I have collected are in my life and why their ability to put me into instant replay mode is so important. The ones that survive my editing process, and often the ones that were hardest to edit, seem to have the most impact.
Maybe there is a learning here. When I post an image in an article here or print it and hang it on a wall of a gallery, the viewers see it only in their own context. If the composition is good enough, or the color is vibrant or if it touches some emotion in them, then they may like it. But an image may be important to me for other intensely important reasons.
It is difficult to say what makes a great image.
November 4, 2026
What Is a Photograph?
I still see people agonizing over how much processing they are “allowed” to do on their photographs. But what is a photograph and what does it become if it is processed heavily?
Unique
Photography is rather unique among 2-dimensional art forms. Other forms like painting construct an image directly on the media. It is immediate and tactile. With photography, we usually capture the image whole and then indirectly manipulate the pixels. The final image is produced later.
The tools we have available now allow great freedom in the manipulation that can be done. So much so that some people cry foul and say, “too much, it’s not a photograph anymore.”
Is there a rule here, or are people just expressing their preferences?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Technology
In photography, we never actually touch our pixels, and usually not the media. Light is captured by a sensor or on film. It is digitized. Then we process it as data in our computer. Even when we view the resulting image on a screen or as a print, we still only indirectly see the result of our processing. A pixel, as a digital value, is almost imaginary. It cannot be seen or felt or weighed.
So, we must use a complex tool chain of technology to accomplish our results. Modern cameras are amazingly complex, with processing power that rivals computers of a few years ago. The digital files must be brought into our computer and processed with some of the available application software, depending on our preferences.
Even to view the image requires complex technology. Web browsers or other viewing software using high resolution monitors. Printers with sophisticated error diffusion algorithms, using multiple inks to construct a pleasing representation of what we created. To make a print, the pixels are “sprayed” on a media by a machine, not by our hand.
Even if you use film, it must be developed and printed. It is probably digitized. Then it goes into the technology chain I described above.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Core of reality
But despite the technology differences, a major factor is that traditional photography usually starts with a real scene. This, to me, is one of the great things about photography, but also a problem for many people. In normal practice, we do some corrections and tone changes, maybe remove some distractions. If we compare the result next to the original scene, nearly everyone would recognize that the photograph represents that scene.
Because of the history of the medium and the nature of the photographic process, many people imply a contract that a photograph must represent reality. Reality being what was actually in front of the camera at the moment of exposure.
If our artistic processing deviates too far from this implied contract, many people get offended. Or at least nervous and filled with doubt.
The question seems to revolve around whether the artist claims the image represent reality or it is art. If I see a photograph of a news event, I expect it to be showing reality. Sure, the exposure could be corrected, and a few very minor distractions could be cloned out. But these changes must not alter the substance of what the image is showing. If a news outlet uses an image that is altered to significantly change the scene, or is created by AI, they will lose all credibility with me. I will never trust them again.
But to me, art has completely different standards. I can’t help what viewers assume, but I can control my intent.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Painting
Let’s contrast this to painting. I believe the same standards exist, but to a lesser degree. If a painting claims to show reality, it must do so. Otherwise, it is art and it can do whatever it wants. But few people expect a painting to represent a scene in exact detail.
Did you know that some portraits of Abraham Lincoln were somewhat false? He was a notoriously homely man. Some portraits softened his features to make him look better. That seems a gray area. Not a faithful representation but not entirely lying.
At the other extreme are the paintings of Albert Bierstadt. He was a romantic artist of the 19th century who glorified the American west. I have been to some of the locations he painted, and I can attest that his images are complete fiction. But they were popular. In those days, very few people could visit those areas, so they believed his paintings as reality.
But the nature of a painting is that the artist starts with a blank canvas and uses a brush or a knife or a pencil to lay pigment on the substrate. It is hands on and considered to be creative. There is little criticism if the artist takes liberties or completely makes up the scene.
Even if you watch a painter working en plein air, the resulting image is seldom a faithful representation of the scene. They take whatever liberties they want to simplify, or eliminate distractions, or change it to be more interesting. It is recognized as being art.
I have never seen one criticized for not looking exactly like the original. People hold photographs to different standards. Even other photographers.
What is a photograph?
So, then, what is a photograph and why do we treat them differently?
I believe it is because many people have a model in their heads that paintings are creative works and can be anything the artist wants to do, but photographs are snapshots of reality and should stay that way. I believe this statement is too restrictive of photography as it exists today.
In the 19th century, when photography became popular, the technology was crude. Photographers could only capture black & white images of still subjects. So the marketing pitch was that they can capture reality in an instant.
We have come a long way. The technology has far fewer limitations. Very high speed or very long exposures can freeze or express movement. Dynamic range is extended. Digital prints are almost perfect. Editing tools are so good that there are few excuses for having an imperfect image – unless that is the artist’s intent. Parts of scenes can be composited together, or parts can be “painted”, or AI generated.
Because of these greater freedoms, artists are now able to express themselves more. In the same way that Impressionist painters were completely rejected by their Realist contemporaries, we see photographers beginning to push the boundaries and make photographs into something different, and bring criticized for it. Something that does not follow the rules and conventions established by others is initially rejected.
What is a photograph? Maybe it is anything you want it to be. Maybe the distinction is the contract with the viewer. Is it presented as reality or as art?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
When is it not a photograph?
I consider myself a photographer and an artist. In my work, I may alter the pixels any way I want to achieve the result I like, because I am presenting art to you, not documentary. I can blur or sharpen. Distractions can be removed. Skies can be replaced. I often composite bits and pieces of many disparate scenes to create something new. I have been known to stretch and twist and flip with little regard to the “truth”. of the actual scene. Sometimes, the more I can forget the original scene, the better my art gets.
With all of this, I am comfortable calling my work photography. Occasionally I call it art based on photography. Depends on the audience.
Since what I do is pixel based, and nearly all of it came from captures of real scenes, it is clear to me that it is photography. It does not matter much to me where the pixels came from as long as they are my original work. It doesn’t matter to me if the end image represents something that exists in reality.
On the other hand, by my value system, if a digital image is AI generated or entirely drawn or painted, it blurs into what I would call Digital Art. The distinction being that there was no image capture at all.
My position is that I will not use AI. I don’t like it, and I don’t plan to use it to create my images. I do not consider it photography. That’s my bias.
My stance
One of my granddaughters is studying animation. Most of her work is based on 3-D models. Is that photography? Not to me. And not to her. But if one of those artists chooses to call what they do photography, or if someone calls what I do Digital Art, I am not in a place of authority to prevent it. Labels are not important to me.
So, a working definition for me is that it is a photograph if it was made mostly from photographic captures. The degree of processing makes little difference. If it was substantially generated by AI, it was not a photographic capture. But the reality is, there is no rule, and I don’t think there can be.
My contract with the viewer is this: if I claim the image is truth, it should essentially represent the original – essentially, I am not a photojournalist. If it is art, then almost anything goes. Either way, I claim it is a photograph.
I will not give you an AI generated image and claim it is a photograph I made. Neither will I go on a public rant against an artist who does. The philosophers and great minds can debate the fine points. I prefer to go on just making my art however I want to.
October 21, 2026
Behind a Mask
I’m referring to masks we use for editing digital photographs. They are one of the most powerful tools we have. A lot of magic goes on behind a mask.
I will use Lightroom Classic and Photoshop for my examples, because I know them best, but this is not a how-to article.
Adjustments
Some of the most widely used editing operations in photography are adjustments. An adjustment means that some property of the image data is modified – more or less, color shift, higher or lower contrast, etc.
I believe that all photo editing tools have some means of making adjustments. Some of them differ in the ability to make only global adjustments, affecting the whole image, or masked adjustments, affecting only a selected part.
Whether global or selected, the adjustment alters some property of the image. For example, some of the Lightroom adjustments are temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, texture, clarity, dehaze, vibrance, and saturation. There are others. This is just an overview.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Why adjust?
I’m talking about adjustments as if they are a good thing. But why do we need them?
When we load photographs into our computer, they are mostly in the form of a jpg or a raw file. A jpg file (broken acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group – the jpeg was shortened to jpg back in the days when Windows only supported 3-character file extensions) is fast and easy, highly compressed to save storage, and VERY highly processed. The algorithms have already made the decisions about how the image should look in terms of brightness, color balance, contrast, etc. Generally, they look good as soon as you see them. Average, but good. They may need some adjustments, but usually little.
A raw file is just that, it contains almost the raw data off the camera sensor. Almost, because all cameras do some processing of the data. It might “fix” bad pixels or apply some “secret sauce” algorithms proprietary to the manufacturer to correct for sensor characteristics or to give the manufacturer’s “look”. Each manufacturer’s raw format is different.
Raw processing software, such as Adobe Lightroom Classic, reads the proprietary raw format, does Bayer filter demosaicing, and gets the data converted to an array of pixel values. The image we see on screen at that point is rather bland. Contrast is low, colors are not vibrant, it is not ready to share.
By the way, the Bayer filter is one of the secrets that is baked into our camera technology. It is elegantly simple, but a little deceitful. Check it out in this blog. You do not have to understand it to take great pictures, but understanding it gives you a little more mastery of the technology.
I only shoot raw files, but why do that if it requires more work? When it comes to my images, I’m a control freak. I choose to do the adjustments myself according to my vision rather than letting an algorithm do it. And raw files have much more data and can be edited to a much larger degree than jpg.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
A mask
I said that adjustments can be global or selective. Masks are commonly used to do selective adjustments. Being able to work precisely on areas that need adjustment gives us far more precision and control.
Think of a mask like a stencil. It blocks some areas from being altered but lets the adjustment flow through to other areas. Because we are using digital technology, the mask can be “perfect”. That is, it can totally block the adjustment where we do not want it. Or if you prefer, the mask can be a fractional value, allowing us to only let a portion of the adjustment through. This allows great artistic control.
The concept and application of masking was not created in digital. photography. It goes back to stencils, block printing, wood cuts, watercolor painting, integrated circuit production, etc. With our current technology, it just becomes far easier to use it.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Power
Global adjustments are a big hammer. They change everything. That is useful, but not adequate. What if there is a small portion of the frame where we want to viewer’s eye directed? A masked adjustment to select only that area does it. It is more and more common to want to selectively lighten or darken some areas, to change the color of a small area, or to change the color or contrast of just the sky or a portion of the sky.
These are examples. It would be impossible to list all the applications of masked adjustments. I believe that masking is a critical skill for photographers doing digital processing of images. If you don’t or can’t do it, you will be at a disadvantage compared to other artists.
If an image is going into my portfolio, or if I am going to print it, it is almost certain that there will be extensive masked adjustments made to it. Masking has become such an indispensable tool that I can’t not use it. Why would I choose to ignore one of the most powerful creative tools I have?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Benefits of AI
From my viewpoint, the last few years of maturation for Lightroom Classic has revolved around more and easier to use masked adjustments and AI-aided mask creation. These are 2 very powerful trends. And yes, AI is in there.
A few years ago, only a few adjustments had any rudimentary mask capability, on an individual basis. Now, it has flipped. The app has extensive masking, and we can apply most of the adjustments through them. A much better model.
Besides the manually created masks, there are many excellent AI generated ones. Sky selection has been around for a while, and it is getting much better as algorithms improve. So is the Subject selection. There is detailed ability to mask people, from the whole person, their skin, or clothes, down to just the pupils of their eyes. And they are pretty decent masks.
Have you tried the Landscape mask? It is relatively new. You can let it find and create separate masks for sky, snow, architecture, vegetation, water, natural ground, artificial ground, and mountains. It is a great tool for quickly separating blocks of an image for individual work. The masks are usually pretty good. But like all things AI, it works well most of the time but fails spectacularly at others. I often try it first to see if it can tease apart the areas I want to adjust separately.
The Adobe “AI” ability to locate areas and mask them is improving steadily and bringing us much benefit. If the AI can do what we would have to do manually, and give even better results, I would be crazy not to use it. Using AI to generate a mask is not at all contrary to my vows to not use it to create my images.
Need Photoshop?
The steady improvement of Lightroom Classic brings up a question I often ask myself: do I still need Photoshop?
Much of the time, the answer is “no”. Well over 90% of my final images never see Photoshop. Lightroom is getting very adequate for most image correction tasks.
There is another class of edits, though. The strength, and a weakness, of Lightroom, is that it cannot create or destroy pixels. It is a strength, because all our edits are non-destructive. Anything can be undone with no damage. But some image manipulation I want to do involves major pixel damage.
A simple case is compositing. Lightroom cannot bring all or parts of several images together as one image. Photoshop does this without breaking a sweat. It is happy to do anything we want to any or all the pixels in an image. Many of these edits are destructive, that is, they cannot be undone. But if that is what I want to do, that is the tool that will do it.
And in Photoshop, the masking is even more powerful. Learning to use masking in Lightroom creates knowledge that carries over, in principle, to Photoshop.
Example
Here is a simple before and after example of Lightroom Classic adjustments. There is nothing special about the image. It is just one I shot last week in the Rocky Mountains. The first image is a raw image right out of my Nikon Z7-II. The second is after some quick adjustments, many using masks. No Photoshop was involved. Which one, if either, would you rather show people?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Put on your mask
I hope I have convinced you that masking is one of the power features everyone needs to become confident with. Accept it. Learn it. Masks create magic. They are one of the simplest image editing tools to make your photographs stand out.
I think you will find your images will look better and have more impact when you get familiar with digital masking.
October 14, 2026
Style Trends
Does photography follow style trends? Of course. Most everything does. Is that bad? Maybe. Maybe not. I think it depends on why you do it.
People follow trends
Whole industries exist to create changing trends. People follow the trends, because their influencers do and we want to maintain status by being like them.
Try to think of something that does not follow trends. Clothes fashions do. Hair fashions do. Car styling does. “Health” trends come and go. Advice on dating or raising kids or looking for jobs changes all the time. Home decor and even houses themselves change all the time.
Think about it: how valuable is it to the trend setting companies to have us follow trends? They make billions because we are frequently compelled to change our wardrobe or home decor or technology products. If things were static, much more money would stay in our pocket rather than being transferred to theirs. Guess what their goal is.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Photography does, too
Photography is not at all immune to this. Some of what we follow is technology improvements. And I am glad of much of that. We now have mirrorless cameras, high resolution sensors, better software editing tools, improved printers, and much more.
I am not a Luddite where it comes to improved products.
But the work we create may also vary with drifting waves of style trends. Much of what we see, especially online, is people following a popular style or copying what a respected influencer does. At various times we have seen lots of black & white with crushed blacks reminiscent of Ansel Adams. Or brash pop art treatments in the style of Andy Warhol. Or weirdly colored simulated cross processing effects. Intentional camera movement is probably in the trend list.
There are whole libraries and applications available to change our digital images to look like your favorite film, because a film look is popular now. The limitations and distortions are sought after to recapture aspects of some remembered “good old days” of photography.
And remember the garish results when HDR first became popular? I’m glad that wave passed quickly. Actually, it did not pass, it’s just that we have better technology allowing us to use it, when necessary, without looking fake.
Lately, highly processed “high tech” looks are in vogue. We have great tools now to increase sharpening and contrast far beyond what used to could be done. We have AI to remove defects or elements we don’t want. Or to add any elements we wish had been there. It. is natural to overdo it sometimes when experimenting with new capability.
It used to be that our camera and film determined the look we would get. Now that anything can be simulated or created, it brings up the question of what photographic art really is.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Is it supposed to be “true”?
Just today (as I was writing this) I read a rant by a photographer decrying that many people misuse clarity and texture controls and end up creating something that is not completely true to the original.
But what does it mean to be “true”? Must a photograph be an exact copy of the original scene? If that is your goal, prepare to be disappointed. An image cannot be the original scene. It is a 2-dimensional projection through a lens onto a light sensitive sensor, processed through lots of software, and printed on a substrate with inks that absorb light rather than emitting it. Each stage introduces faults and distortions.
At best, you could produce a print that you would say looks a lot like the original.
But is that the real goal? Or should we shoot to produce an artistic representation of our response to a scene?
If this is the goal, as it is for me, then who is to say it is a fault if our artistic creation departs from what the original was? These intentional departures sometimes follow popular trends.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Styles
If our image is an artistic creation, then introducing trending styles is OK. I don’t necessarily think it is good, but no one should say it is bad. But “because everybody else is doing it” is not persuasive to me.
Some people feel compelled to follow the style du jour to be popular and get “likes” on social media. If that is your goal, do what you have to do.
If you are a wedding photographer, I can believe that what brides want is strongly influenced by what they see in the current issue of Bride’s magazine. Likewise, some commercial shooters must follow styles because that is what their customers want. Today.
Styles, by definition, are fashion. They are transient. In my view, they should not be the thing that defines your art. In the same way that you are not your clothes or the car you drive.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Follow your instincts
Our artistic vision develops over time as we have experiences and see great work and practice and try things and find out what resonates with us. Styles are “high frequency” noise. They come and go rapidly and should not greatly influence the vision we are building. Styles should be recognized as temporary trends.
Our artistic expression comes from something inside of us. Our particular way of seeing that is different from other people. Styles try to make everybody the same. But we should fight that normalizing force and strive to be ourselves.
So, experiment with styles when you want. Use it as a learning experience. Or maybe just for fun. “Try on” some and see if there is anything about them you want to keep. It should be guiltless. But don’t let the current prevailing style trend define your art. Trending styles are neither good or bad. Know that if you try to build your reputation on one, it will change out from under you soon.
And do not feel like a failure or left out if the art within you is not what you see the influencers pushing today. It is more important to be true to one’s self. Next week the style will change, but we must keep creating our art. Be confident about your artistic decisions.
September 30, 2026