Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: photographic technology

  • Do You Need A New Camera?

    Do You Need A New Camera?

    The reflexive answer is “Yes, of course”. Most of us lust for new equipment. But think about it a bit. What about your camera is holding you back? How will having a new camera make you a better and more creative photographer?

    Resolution

    Resolution is one of the technical parameters of cameras that increases over time. It is an easy thing to measure and use as a figure of merit for comparing cameras. Is it a good measure?

    Well, yes, more is better, some of the time. It depends on your needs. Will you be making and selling prints that are 48″ or larger? You probably need a lot of resolution. But even then, it depends on what you shoot. If your subjects are highly detailed and you want your viewers to be able to come up nose-length to the print and see every bit of the fine detail, well, it comes with a cost. You want all the resolution you can get. And more.

    Be aware there is a cost. Not just the price of the camera. File sizes get huge. After I’ve taken an image into Photoshop for editing I sometimes end up with files that are more than 4GBytes in size. Everything has to scale up with this: the computer memory, all my disk sizes, including backups, memory card size and cost, and my speed of working slows down.

    So far it is worth it to me, but there will be a limit.

    Speed

    One of the other metrics people use to justify a new camera is image capture speed. If your current camera can “only” take 5 frames a second wouldn’t it be a lot better to have one that takes 10 frames a second?

    Maybe. It depends on what you do. I no longer shoot sports so this has become insignificant to me. Occasionally I need to take a burst of a few frames to try to capture a certain moment. It is becoming more and more rare, though. I usually challenge myself to use my instincts developed over the years to know how to recognize and capture the “decisive moment” instead of blasting through a group of 20 frames hoping the one I want is in there somewhere. It usually works well for me and I feel like a better craftsman.

    Again, your mileage will vary. It depends on the real needs you have. Don’t just optimizing specs.

    Dynamic range

    Dynamic range is one that can draw me. This is the range of dark to light values the sensor can reliably record.

    I often have very wide exposure ranges in my images. It is much better for me to be able to capture the entire range in one frame instead of relying on putting together an HDR set. This is because many of my pictures are strongly oriented to motion. That makes each frame unique. It is almost impossible to stack them for HDR.

    But are you really at a disadvantage with what you have today? I shoot Nikon, so that is all I can talk about. Full frame Nikons since at least the D800 (about 2012?) have excellent dynamic range. So if you have a high end camera that is not more than about 10 years old it probably does a very good job. Note, the image with this blog is one of my earliest pictures shot on my D800. Great camera.

    Are you really being held back?

    I suggest you give it careful consideration before laying out a lot of money on a new camera. Unless you just have thousands sitting around that you want to get rid of. If so, congratulations. Check out my prints. 🙂

    Instead of “do I need a new camera” maybe a better question for yourself is “how do I make better images?” This is much more difficult and important. And it is something you can do without spending much money.

    Ansel Adams once said “The single most important component to a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” Meaning, of course, that the photographer, the artist,, determines the quality of the image. Do you have the skills to get the best from the equipment you have now? Do you really know all the ways you can edit and improve your “negatives”?

    Todd Vorenkamp, whose opinion I’ve come to respect, said:

    “Search yourself for improvement, not your gear. A great photographer can make a great photograph with any camera. A poor photographer can make a poor photograph with the world’s most expensive camera. Photography is a technologically based art form, but the technology does not make the art, the human behind the camera does. Do not look for solutions in something that runs on batteries and arrives in a box. “

    I believe this. And it is a gutsy thing for Todd to say, because he works for a large camera retailer. BTW, B&H is a great place to buy your equipment. Be assured I get no compensation for this plug.

    We have come to a time where camera designers are pushing the limits of physics. Improvement in resolution and dynamic range are getting much harder. Incremental Engineering improvements still happen all the time, but true breakthroughs are more rare. Newer cameras usually have small improvements and more bells and whistles to have to learn.

    How to move forward

    Most photographers are always shopping for shiny new equipment and the greatest new technology. I include myself. Nikon, if you’re listening, I would love for you to bring out a 100MPixel mirrorless body. I would probably put my deposit down immediately.

    But Todd is right, and Ansel is right – it is the photographer that makes the difference. I believe you should not go for a new camera (and the computer processing to go with it) until you are confident you can wring all the performance possible from your current one. Best to master your current tools before getting new ones to learn.

    Are your techniques good enough to make the best image the camera is capable of? Are you confident you can edit well enough to achieve your goals? Maybe hardest of all, do you understand your vision for what you want to create?

    When you can honestly assess those questions I think you will know when it is time to move on. Maybe you do need a new camera.

  • Frozen in Time

    Frozen in Time

    Many of us go around trying to freeze moments in time. For a lot it takes the form of happy, smiling images to post to social media to prove (to us?) what a great time we are having on vacation, graduation, the wedding, etc. Or we may freeze great landscapes or seascapes or sunsets so we can show their beauty.

    But what is your experience when you share these moments with other people? You pull them up on your phone to show your buddy. Flip, view a few seconds, flip, flip (faster now), flip…. People only look at images on screen for a couple of seconds.

    As someone who shoots thousands of images and makes prints I can say from experience that an image is not really complete and meaningful until a great print is made.

    Digital images are impermanent

    Digital images are impermanent in several ways. They are just bits on your hard disk or in the “cloud”. Unlike in the days when we had albums or even shoe boxes of prints, our pictures now can disappear in an instant. Hard disks fail. I know very well. I have thrown away dozens of them.

    My main storage devices now are all RAID drives. This means they have multiple drives in each and the information is partitioned so that if one drive fails, everything can continue with no data loss. But that is just mitigating the problem.

    Technologies change and become obsolete. How many of you have some pictures on a floppy disk or CD or some other media that you can’t read anymore? It happens. Fairly frequently.

    And your cloud provider can go away or stop serving you if you don’t pay. Or if you don’t keep up with the never ending system updates for your computer and they stop supporting your version.

    Another problem with digital images is that most people do not have a good cataloging system for them. Are your images stored in chronological order in Apple Photos? How do you locate that great photo of Grandma you took once? Do you even remember the year? It sounds harsh, but if you can’t find it, you basically don’t have it.

    Digital images are fluid

    Another property of digital images is that they are fluid. That is, they can be changed at any time. That can be useful sometimes. Break up with that loser? Edit him out.

    On a more serious note, it also means that the look of the image can be changed at a whim, depending on your mood or your developing Photoshop skills. Your digital image will be content to exist on your disk in an easily editable state. By its nature, it is perpetually a work in progress. It does not require you to ask or answer hard questions. It is not forcing you to confront your feelings or interpretation. But a print commits the image to a hard media.

    When you make a print, you are compelled to think it through in more depth. You are not going to take the time and effort and expense of printing unless you know how you view the image. You work on it more that if you are going to put together a slide show. It has more permanence and It represents our convictions about the image at a point in time. This forces us to think about it more.

    When the ink is laid down you have created a piece of art, not just some bits. It means something different to you and your viewers.

    A good print is compelling

    Have you been in front of a well crafted original print by Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange or John Paul Caponigro or any great photographer you like? It has depth and significance that is impossible to create on a screen. We assume from our experience that images on screen are fleeting. But these great prints are different.

    People look at images on a screen for a few seconds. They study great prints for minutes. The print can grab you; stop you in your tracks; confront you with something you can’t ignore. It is a piece of art, not just flickering bits. It is real.

    Prints are the gold standard

    I talked before about how transient bits can be and how devices fail and technologies go obsolete. Good prints, though, have substance. They are physical. They are a real object with weight and texture and size. A well done print can last 100-200 years without degrading. It is something that can stand the test of time.

    Ansel Adams stopped printing over 40 years ago, but one of his prints is as impressive today as it was then. And it will probably be as impressive 100 years from now.

    A print is a frozen idea

    As I mentioned, you are not compelled to “finish” your digital images. It is far easier to shoot than to finish them. You can leave them sitting there on your computer with only a fuzzy notion of how we really feel about them.

    When you commit to creating a print it forces you to confront your feelings or interpretation. You go through some serious self-examination. Once the ink is on the paper it is not going to change. It represents our idea about the image at a point in time. We have to go through the work to decide how we really feel about the image in order to print it. And we spend a lot more time bringing it to a high level of perfection.

    This is a good thing. We are creating a real, permanent object. It represents us. We feel pressure to make it our art. It is our expression for the world to see. We are creating something that will probably outlive us. We want our viewers to see what we saw and feel what we felt.

    It is quite possible to return to an image years later and make a new print that is very different. That is quite common and healthy. It means we have grown and developed new viewpoints. If we rework the image and create a new print, it is a new work of art. It could hang proudly beside the original as portraits of the artist at 2 different points in his life.

    It is the only physical result of photography

    When I press the shutter of my digital camera, not much really happens. Some photons are exposed to the sensor and some electrical change is read and converted to bits and transferred to the memory card.

    Even when I import the digital files into my computer, they are still just bits – minute, almost unmeasurable units of electrical or magnetic energy. I can hit the Delete key and they are gone without a trace. My main photo disk has over 6 TBytes of data on it (6,000,000,000,000 chunks of 8 bits). But it does not weigh a gram more than it did empty.

    I can argue that I have not actually made anything of value until I make a print. The print is something real. It is physical. People can see it and feel it and look at it as art or garbage. But regardless of how they feel about it, they can’t see or feel anything until it is a print. The print can be framed and hung on the wall and passed down to generations or sold. The bits cannot.

    It completes the cycle

    And printing is good for you as an artist. It completes the process. It brings art to life. You have to work at it, wrestle with it, make mistakes and do it over. You have to make hard decisions that shape the final result. The print is a commitment of your vision, frozen in time.

    And when you get done, you may be disappointed. You envisioned more. You hoped, when it was just bits, that it would be more. The reality of the print can be cruel. You have to reexamine everything from your conceptual idea to your technique. It is what it is. Learn from it. We want people to see and feel what compelled us to take the picture. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

    But you won’t know what it really is until you have made the best possible print. That is your art. If you revisit the image later you may see it differently and print a different interpretation. Printing is a key expression of our art.

    I reference Ansel Adams a lot in this article. In closing, he famously said:’

    “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”

  • JPG vs. Raw

    JPG vs. Raw

    It seems like deciding on jpg vs. raw formats for our images is a problem for some photographers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it is lack of knowledge or maybe because it is sometimes discussed in almost mythological terms. Jpg and raw are just 2 ways of saving our images. Each is good for some things but there are tradeoffs to consider. It is just technology, not magic.

    Image formats

    When you take an image on your digital camera, each manufacturer has their own proprietary magic they do on the bits coming off the sensor. This lets them tune their image to meet their goals. If you shot the same scene with different cameras you would notice subtle differences – slight color balance differences, slight variations is tonal contrast, different handling of shadows and highlights, etc. These are usually small, but they give a camera it’s unique character.

    But we need to consume these pixels in our image processing software. So there needs to be standardized ways of storing the images and reading them in our computer. These are file formats. There are 2 main choices.

    Jpg is an industry standard format. The format is very widely understood and used. All images, once converted to jpg, are compatible.

    What we call raw files are really proprietary file formats created by different camera manufacturers. Image processing software, like Adobe Lightroom, has taken the responsibility to be able to read the files written by virtually all camera manufacturers. For instance, I shoot Nikon, so the images LIghtroom reads and handles have the “.nef” extension. Lightroom knows how to interpret this and convert it to editable pixels.

    The key thing here is that these raw files all contain roughly the same information, but are not directly compatible. Thankfully our software handles the differences gracefully.

    Technical details – jpg

    The term jpg, more precisely “jpeg” is derived from a standard created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The name jpg is an abbreviated acronym.

    The problem was that digital files are very large, this made them consume lots of disk space back when disks were small. It also used up lots of bandwidth transmitting them back when internet was slow and much more expensive (anyone remember dial up modems?).

    The jpg standard is based on some brilliant insights on human perception to allow encoding image files so they look good but are much smaller. The underlying principle is that humans are more sensitive to variations of tone (luminance) than they are to color (chrominance). The jpg processing reduces the luminance information and greatly reduces the chrominace data to acheive reductions of about 10x typically.

    In general, transforming an image to jpg is a multi step process. It involves a transformation where the luminance and chrominance information is separated. Then the chrominance information is downsampled, or reduced. Then there is a grouping of data into blocks and a process called discrete cosine transform is applied to the data blocks. This transformed information is quantitized and encoded. Finally the data is written out in a defined format as a jpg file. It is not at all necessary to know these details, just that the data in a jpg file is far removed from the original pixels that came from the camera.

    It is a lossy compression technique. Yes, it throws away a lot of data. This is one of the big tradeoff points of jpg. But a fringe benefit is that the image is made to look “nice”. The result is pleasing to most people without further processing

    Technical details – raw

    These files are called “raw” because they contain minimally processed data from the camera sensor. They are absolutely not ready to be viewed or processed. Some people describe it as a digital negative. Conceptually this is pretty good way to help us think about it, but it is not a valid description. The data is not negative and it is not viewable. It might be better to think of it as exposed but unprocessed film.

    To follow this metaphor, a raw image processor like Lightroom “develops” the image and makes it viewable and editable.

    Why raw? It captures and beings into the computer all the data that the camera sensor was able to record. It has the full range of color and tones. Nothing has been eliminated yet.

    In addition, the raw format has not had any lossy compression applied. Nothing is thrown away or reduced. Because of these things an image from a raw file requires manual editing to complete it. Sometimes a lot of editing.

    Tradeoffs

    So jpg is made small as possible and generally nice looking as soon as you see it. You can immediately look at it or send it to someone or post it to your social media. Yes, some information has been intentionally eliminated, but that is not important to most people. If you don’t notice it then it must not matter.

    On the other hand, if you want to make a large print of a jpg you may see noisy patterns that are euphemistically called “artifacts”. This might be mitigated with clever software, but your mileage may vary.

    And there is an editing danger you need to be aware of: every time you save a jpg file it goes through the transform process to reduce data. So every time you edit it and save it you lose information and introduce more artifacts. If you want to edit a jpg always save the edited file in a lossless format, like psd or tif.

    The raw files are usually very large. On my current main camera a typical raw file is 50-70 MBytes. A high quality jpg of the same resolution is around 4-5 MBytes. So, 10 to 1 or greater differential. And the raw files require an investment of time and training and tools to process them into a respectable state.

    But, and this makes up for everything, the raw file preserves every bit of information that we can wring out of the sensor. A modern sensor is marvelous and enables very aggressive processing. The raw format contains the full resolution of the pixels. It is not limited to 8 bit data like jpg. I often do things with the image data that I could not have envisioned when I took the original photo.

    Different needs

    When would you want to use one vs. the other? Well, if I was shooting a wedding I would probably use jpg. Say I come away with 3000 images. I would want to be able to scan through and see good views of all of them so I can quickly pick the 100-200 best to share with the client. If I did my job well the images should not need much editing. I would not have time to process this many raw files.

    Also, if I am shooting snaps of my family that is a time for jpgs. And if I was on vacation and just shooting travel photos for memories that is good jpg territory. I guess if my memory card was nearly full and I didn’t have a spare I might switch to jpg to keep shooting a few more frames. I try to prevent that from happening.

    For me, any other time requires raw files. It is my go-to choice. I know I want to process the images heavily. I am not afraid of the techniques. Given the choice I will always want to retain the maximum information and resolution possible. This given me the flexibility to make massive changes or change my mind and go back to re-process the image for a different look

    I tried to present a very neutral view of the tradeoffs of the 2 formats. I can sympathize that the choice is hard for some people. For me, it is straightforward. Use jpg if I am taking shots of people and I am confident it will need little processing. Otherwise, definitely raw.

    The image with this article is a jpg. It looks fine for this application.

  • Look Sharp

    Look Sharp

    No, I’m not giving advice on fashion trends. You probably wouldn’t want to follow my lead. But I can talk some about image sharpness. Photographers often obsess over getting the sharpest possible image. Today I want to give an overview of the factors that make an image look sharp and some that make it not sharp.

    Sharpness chain

    I described the transforms in the image capture process as the sharpness chain. Physically and logically there are several components that light has to go through before we have an image on our screen to view and edit. In may be more precise to describe this as the “unsharpness” chain, because unfortunately, every step along the way degrades the image to some extent.

    Digital camera loss of sharpness chain

    The original image is, by definition, “perfect” since it is the original. The light then goes through a filter (if you use one, I usually do), the lens itself, the Bayer filter to do color separation, the sensor chip, various processing stages in the camera hardware, and the raw conversion. I include the raw conversion here because the image is not editable until this has been done. There is no gain at each of these stages. This means that each stage degrades the image.

    This is not to be discouraging. Modern cameras and lenses are fantastic. “Fantastic” means they degrade the image less than ever before in history. This is not a bad state of affairs. If you are using excellent equipment all along the chain you can achieve some great theoretical results.

    Focus

    Oops, I said theoretical results. What I mean is that under perfect conditions the camera system can produce excellent results. But we may not always apply the best techniques when we are using the equipment. There are many things we can do to make the image sharpness worse.

    Focus, for instance. My eyes are getting old and weak. I usually rely on the camera auto focus system. And these do a great job now. But did I move the camera after focusing? Did I focus on the right part of the composition? Is the light level bright enough to allow the camera to work properly? Was it properly locked down on a good tripod to keep things rigid?

    Motion

    Another problem is camera shake. Pixels in modern sensors are so tiny that very little motion can smear light over several pixel sites. Yes, my camera has internal image stabilization, but this does not entirely compensate for bad technique.

    Way back in the film days we used a rule of thumb of 1 over the film speed to estimate the minimum shutter speed. That is, if using 200 ISO we should be able to shoot at 1/200 of a second and be able to maintain adequate sharpness. Sensors are so fine pitched now that I think the rule should be around 2-3X the ISO to be conservative. So at ISO 200 I should probably shoot at 1/400 to 1/800 second handheld to get good results. Best to always use a sturdy tripod.

    Another common problem is subject motion. This is when the subject is moving relative to the frame during the time the shutter is open. If the subject is moving “enough” you end up with a blurry streak. If this was not the intent you were after, it is an error caused by bad technique. You have to get the shutter speed up enough to “freeze” the subject.

    It is an internal fight with me to make myself raise the ISO speed enough to get the shutter speed I need. I have years of history that images were too noisy unless I stay down around 100 ISO. But with modern cameras it is much less of a problem. My default ISO is usually 400 now. I know that I can go to 3200 and still get good results in many situations. I just have to make myself do it. When I don’t I often get blurry images.

    Diffraction

    One of the things we worry about a lot is depth of field (DOF). This is sort of an illusory concept. It is an attempt to quantize how much of the area from foreground to background is in focus. The reality is only a very small slice is actually in focus. But DOF describes how much is in “acceptable” focus. But acceptable varies with taste and application. There is no official definition of DOF.

    One way we try to cheat the system is to stop the lens down more to increase DOF. It sort of works. It seems to work. But it is not free. Going to a 2 stop higher f-stop number, like f/16 instead of f/8 means that you are letting in 1/4 the light (it’s logarithmic). It also means you are incurring diffraction effects.

    Diffraction is a complex phenomenon. I will just say that at physically smaller apertures (say f/16 and smaller) the perceived sharpness of your image decreases. So don’t just automatically slam your aperture to f/32 to always maximize DOF. It has downsides. Most lenses have a “sweet spot” around 2-3 stops down from the widest aperture. If you have a great f/2.8 lens it probably has optimum sharpness at around f/5.6 to f/8.

    Diffraction is a real phenomenon of physics and I see it all the time. Don’t let me scare you, though. It is one of the tradeoffs. As an experiment sometime put your rig on a tripod and shoot a spread of the same scene at, say, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22. Don’t change the focus point. When you examine the images on your computer at at least 1 to 1 size you will see a fall off of sharpness at f/16 and smaller. On the other hand, the perceived DOF increases at the smaller apertures.

    Trading off DOF and diffraction effects is just one of those balances that photographers have to be able to make automatically. It’s all an artistic judgment. No right or wrong.

    Sharpening

    Regardless of how good or bad your equipment and technique is, at the end of this chain you are now in your computer looking at the image. What can you do?

    First off, expect your image to look blurry when you first view it. What?? I paid thousands for this equipment and it makes blurry images? Yes. if you shoot raw images (always shoot raw unless you have a very good and specific reason not to), almost no processing has been done on it when you first see it on screen.

    All those steps in the sharpness chain guarantee that is seems less sharp to you than you expect. Don’t worry. If you have done your job well you have good data to work with. We can do wonders to increase the perception of sharpness.

    It is the “edges” in your image, the transitions from darker to lighter, that give the perception of sharpness. We have many tools and techniques these days to increase the contrast of these edges.

    Lightroom tools

    If you work in Lightroom, as I do, (or Camera Raw, the equivalent) the Presence section has 2 magic tools: Texture and Clarity. Clarity is a bigger hammer. It increases edge contrast overall. It can really make an image seem to pop.

    Texture is fairly new. It is kind of like Clarity, but gentler and more selective. Increasing Texture concentrates on mid range edges. That is, it ignores the most contrast and least contrast edges and enhances the middle ones. This is a subtle and more fine-grained control. It is a welcome addition to the tool kit.

    Then for finishing an image there are the traditional Sharpening controls in the Detail section. This lets us tune the overall effect by controlling the amount, radius, and detail of the sharpening while being able to use the mask control to adjust the area it is applied to.

    These Lightroom controls are often all that is required to achieve great perceived sharpness. The more I learn the more I am able to completely finish many images using only Lightroom.

    Photoshop tools

    Your workflow or preferences or image needs may take you to Photoshop, the traditional big gun for image processing. There are several tools and techniques that can be used to increase perceived sharpness.

    My go-to tool for Photoshop sharpening is the Smart Sharpen filter. This gives marvelous results and lots of control. It even effectively lets us use Blend-If to selectively fade the sharpening application to highlights and shadows. It is a great tool. And yes, you can go crazy and make the image look horrible, too.

    Another traditional filter is Unsharp Mask. I won’t try to explain why blurring can cause the image to look sharper. It is one of the great mysteries of photography. Maybe a future article. Anyway, this is a software simulation of a technique used by film people to increase sharpness of their prints. It works well. It has somewhat less control than Smart Sharpen, but it is good.

    Then there is the HIgh Pass filter. You almost have to be an engineer to understand the concept, but basically it increases the contrast of the tones at edges to make the image look sharper. It is a very old tool, but it works great for some things.

    There are many possibilities in Photoshop, but I will stop with the Sharpen tool. It is a tool, not a filter. It is brushed on. This lets you brush a sharpening effect very selectively where you want it. It works, but be careful. It is a destructive tool.

    Perception is reality

    There are many options to use and most of them can be combined in various ways to meet your needs. But in the discussion, I kept talking about the “perceived” sharpness. This is the reality of our imaging world. All those stages in the sharpness chain lose quality. The operations we can do in software can make our image look very good. But all these tools we use are trying to simulate what the original scene or our creative vision looked like. All operate on the principle of enhancing edges to make the image look sharper.

    These operations do not actually make the image sharp. They make it appear sharp to the viewer. Maybe it is too fine a distinction. For most of us, all we care about is that it looks good.

    If an image is actually out of focus or blurred badly from camera shake or subject motion we cannot make it perfect. Yes, AI is getting better all the time, but it can’t really make something out of nothing.

    The good news is that these days we have excellent tools for controlling perceived sharpness and making our images almost as sharp looking as we wish.

  • Tools

    Tools

    Man is a tool maker. Tools are used in most activities in our life to extend our performance or help us get our tasks done faster, easier, and more accurately. The same is true in most of our art. Some people say that it is our tool making nature that allowed us to become the dominant species.

    A tool using artist

    I’m an artist. Specifically one who works with images originating as photographs. A camera is a tool I use. So is a computer. So is a printer. These tools do not create my art. I use them as part of my creative process.

    Yes, the tools allow me to create things I could not do otherwise. That just means they are good tools. My Jeep allows me to go places I would rather not have to walk, especially carrying my gear. That does not mean the Jeep creates my art. I know a sculptor who now prints a lot of pieces on a 3D printer. Does that make them no longer art?

    I believe in using tools to make my life better and to take my creativity further. Indeed some images don’t really start coming to life until I am manipulating them in Photoshop. As I try things and apply ideas and tools the essence of the image may start revealing itself to me. Note, though, that I – the artist- decide how the image should develop. I don’t sit back and watch Photoshop create it for me.

    Limits of tools

    There are probably some sharp Adobe computer scientists working on that right now., Maybe someday you will be able to point your phone at a scene and a “perfectly” composed and processed image will appear instantly in your social media feed. I hope for all of our sake that they decide that even though they could, they won’t. (Note: it came faster than I anticipated. Adobe announced many “AI”-based tools at Adobe MAX 2020. Now anyone can do almost anything to an image without know how they did it. Too bad.)

    Tools should be used as force multipliers. Not a crutch to let people with no skills seem to create something. That’s like going to DisneyWorld and believing you went on a pirate adventure. It is a manufactured experience that you did not contribute to. If you are over the age of 5 you know deep down inside it is fake.

    At the risk of being unpopular and sounding like a Luddite I will say I do not believe an image created entirely by a computer without an artist is art. It is just software combining patterns it has been trained with and throwing is a little random variability. Maybe this could be said of some artists, too. Let me just add that I spent an entire career working in advanced computer science, including artificial intelligence. So it’s not like I just hate technology.

    Digital fits my personality

    I am ADD enough that I don’t like there to be much lag between seeing something interesting and capturing it. It would be hard for me to work in a world of making multiple sketches of a scene to work out the best composition and staging, then spending weeks laying down the image slowly in layers with dry times between. All in order to create one work. I would abandon it after the first couple of sketches and be off to another idea.

    Photography is much more immediate and rewarding for me. See a scene. Click. Nice, but maybe move a little to the right. Click. Better. Maybe raise the camera a little higher. Click. Almost there, maybe reduce the depth of field. Wait for the right moment. Click. Good! Now I have a good starting point to work with on the computer to create a final image.

    In the computer I use a fairly disciplined non-destructive workflow. That just means never commit to something that can’t be undone. This does not slow things down and it actually makes it easier to get in a creative flow. That is because whenever I hit a dead end or even just decide I’m not liking the direction things are going, I can back up to any point I want and modify what I’ve done or even throw large “experiments” out and take a whole different path. The tools let my creativity flow naturally.

    This ability to freely experiment and take risks is wonderfully empowering. I even sometimes create several versions of an image. It is an embarrassment of riches to be faced with a hard choice of which one I think works best. The ability to be spontaneous and free is very important to my creativity.

    An artist

    I create art. My camera or my other tools do not create the art, I do. The fact that I start from a photograph should not matter at all. Some people think something is not art unless the artist had a long and difficult process from training through making an image. How myopic and judgmental.

    It had been said that an artist has to suffer. This is true, but you hear the statement from critics more than artists. Critics think they can analyze the process the artist went through to determine the worth of the art. Real artists know that art is suffering and what we learn and the feelings and vision we develop in the process guide our outcome. Art can be a cathartic expression of a deep experience, but that is not required.

    But this “suffering” is very personal and internal, at least for me. It may be the result of decades of failures to realize our vision. A suffering born of frustration that drives a continual renewal and a reach for what we feel but can’t quite express.

    It has almost nothing to do with a camera. That is just a tool, part of the technology used in creating art.

    Any tool

    When someone picks up a tool to create something as art, they become an artist. It doesn’t really matter if it is a brush, a pencil, a welder, … or a camera. What matters is what you do with it. Is something better and more worthwhile because it is carved from marble? Is it better if it is oil applied to canvas? Careful. These are dangerous judgments.

    The art I create is not because I’m a photographer. Photography is a medium that works very well for me. It fits my personality. I use it to create my art.

    I look at the creative process different from an oil painter or sculptor or author or graffiti painter. That is good. Artists are not supposed to be all alike. They should be as unique and individual as possible. That extends to the medium and process and tools, too.

    So, I’m an artist. I use a camera to capture pixels that become my art. I’m proud of it. I like what I create and it works for me. I’m very thankful for the tools I have. They help me create, they do not define me.