Where My Feet Are...

Some thoughts from Tom

Technology influences art.  What you create and how you create it are unique to your individual skills and imagination.  But your creative process is in part defined by your choice of medium and its technical limitations.  I think this is true in all media, and I feel it very strongly in my chosen form, photography.                                                                                    

When I first became interested in photography, it was a chemical process. In black and white photography, sensitized film is exposed to light, causing a subtle change in silver salts that are chemically treated to form microscopic particles of metallic silver, black to the eye and varying in quantity  according to how much light struck the film.  The more light, the larger the concentration of black particles.  Areas where less light struck produced fewer black particles. This produces a negative image on transparent film that is projected onto paper by basically the same process to produce the final positive image.  Things have changed dramatically with the coming of computers and digital cameras.  Photography is now a digital process, where light is electronically recorded.  The information is stored in binary code, manipulated and output for view on paper or monitor.  Matthew Brady would have recognized my darkroom and 35mm SLR as a miniaturized, refined version of the photographic equipment he hauled around with horse and wagon during the Civil War.  But digital?  Wow!

 Both forms record a three dimensional scene, a frozen slice of time and space, and translate it into a permanent, two dimensional image.  But the capture, manipulation and output of the final image is much faster and simpler than before.  Technology has taken a process that was once the domain of specialized craftspeople, simplified it and expanded it far beyond its original form. When I used film, the limitations of a finite quantity of film and the time-consuming process of developing and printing images forced me to think carefully before shooting.  Should I take several pictures of a particular subject, or save film for something that might present itself just around the corner? Whatever decision I made, I wouldn’t know the outcome until hours or days later, when the film was developed.  And when shooting black-and-white, colors reproduce as shades of gray, so form and light were much more important than color.  I learned to “see” in black and white. 

Digital photography offers me freedom from the old chemical process.  I can confirm proper exposure with a glance at a histogram, and view my finished image immediately.  And the number of photos I can take is limited only by the size of my memory card.   Digital photography has simplified a process I gave up, in part, for lack of time and space. I embrace these new changes and step gladly into the future with one foot, but at the same time, I feel my other foot stuck in the past.  I no longer need to pass up shooting a waterscape because a beer bottle floats in the foreground.  It is easily removed on the computer.  But while I have endless tools and opportunities to alter images, I find myself only making changes that I would have done with film.  I adjust image exposure, correct perspective, and remove small imperfections that detract from the overall composition.  Beyond basic adjustment, change comes slowly for me.  Why?  I think it’s a mix of both fear and comfort.  Fear of the unknown, of mastering a new technology that alters a routine and thought process anchored in lessons from the past.  And comfort.  I’ve never created an HDR image or stitched images digitally into a panorama.  I would like to, but something holds me back.  Creating compositions within a 1x1.5 frame proportion and capturing only what I see are self-imposed restrictions, much like a poet writing in the rigidly defined forms of sonnet or haiku.  I use self imposed limits for both the challenge and comfort. Challenge for me has been a conformity with the past rather than an open embrace of the future.  But change is on the horizon.   Recently I’ve been experimenting with the “clarity” adjustment in Photoshop, altering and softening image midtones.  The result is a softer, almost watercolor-like quality that works differently with different images.  The effect can be very subtle or very pronounced.  And it’s a refreshing change from crisp, sharp images that I routinely produce.