There’s no one dominant trend today, but instead there are many simultaneous trends, each evolving and ebbing and flowing alongside each other, or even isolated from one another. There’s less and less of what’s in and what’s out, and much more playing together in symphony.
In representational painting, one of the first things you have to learn is that a white object is never actually white. It always takes on some of the color of the light that hits it and reflects back to the viewer’s eye.
Seems simple enough, but the brain jumps through many hoops to disregard this color information, probably to make life easier for us all. The brain’s so good at this that the only way I know of to see a “white” object’s (or any object’s) true color is by looking through a little hole punched in the middle of a neutral gray card aimed at the object. Painters sometimes use these, and the first time I tried it I was blown away by all the different colors “white” objects actually are.
Most of the time, not noticing or even knowing about all this just makes life less complicated, especially when there are many more important things to worry about. But good photographs are not about most of the time. They’re about the drama, the serenity, the infinite emotions light evokes.
Yet unfortunately, light’s sublime nature is often unthinkingly denuded out of a photograph with the white balance tools without asking why first.
Sure, sometimes it’s necessary. A white shirt in a catalog should probably look as white as possible. And when the light—especially artificial light--hitting an object or person is ugly and only makes things worse, getting rid of it with white balance can save something of the photo.
But it’s never necessary to do so out of laziness or habit or in appeasement of the left brain’s demand for whites to be white. If photography is about light, photographers need to do better than that.
Near my house there’s a white stucco wall that, in the summer, gets both blue light from the sky and reddish light from clouds lit by a setting sun. This mixture creates the most beautiful, ethereal magenta I’ve ever seen. It only lasts a few moments, and I’ve never been able to capture it fully with a photograph, but I can keep trying.
Color photography is about the infinite and fleeting flavors of light, and not about the plain vanilla of white balance. Embrace the color of light, like Riccardo Bernardi does here for Schön! Magazine
Back in day, a single photograph could rise to fame and fortune all by itself. Steve McCurry’s Afghan girl, Eisenstaedt’s “VJ Day in Times Square,” Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag raising—all these and many more stand supreme and alone in time and memory.
Those days, though, are mostly over. We all see far too many images—both still and moving—for any one of them to stand out so brilliantly. And perhaps those images we hold as iconic never really stood by themselves as much as we think anyway.
To comprehend the VJ day couple kissing in Times Square as special, the viewer would have to know what VJ day meant, would have to know about the years of war that preceeded it. Otherwise, there’s nothing extra remarkable about it. Everything needs context.
But context and story can be conjured for just about any subject matter with a series of images carefully arranged with the eye of a film editor. A wide shot in an REI catalog showing the hard weather, followed by a close up to show determination. A view of the Dharavi area of Mumbai contrasted with portraits of people working and creating there.
It doesn’t always take much, but the context has to be there rather than assumed.
Probably a lot of photographers think this way subconsciously, the result of exposure to so much media growing up.
But however this shift away from the single image arrived, we’re all film editors and cinematographers now—even when working with still images.
The B&H catalog contains pages of expensive tools to help photographers not ruin their pictures with harsh light and blown-out highlights. And God help a photographer naïve and uneducated enough to go out in the mid-day sun to begin with.
Luckily, fashion photography great Mario Testino chose to disregard such time-honored wisdom in a recent spread for the March 2011 Vogue UK. The whole thing takes place under a hot, drenching sun, and you can almost feel the heat just looking at the photographs.
Mario Testino can presumably get away with just about anything he likes, but part of his greatness lies in the fact that he doesn’t push the limits just because he can. It’s a photo shoot on and about a sundrenched beach. And if you want to show a beach drenched by an overbearing sun, well, you have to show it that way. Softening the sun or filling in all the shadows here would have softened the look, and turned it into something completely different (cue the generic, stock tourist shots). And for those shadows he did fill in, presumably he made a creative choice to do so.
Sometimes blown out highlights, sometimes filled in shadows…sometimes this, sometimes that…the path to creativity is not like following a recipe to bake a cake.
I think a big reason art directors and those paying the bills often want to punt and play it safe and stick to a recipe is that taking risks doesn’t work out so well every time. Better to be safe than sorry. But this leads to a mindset of always playing it safe, which paradoxically risks loosing viewers as they get bored with the same thing time after time. And that’s a much larger problem than a blown-out detail.
While it’s not always a wise choice to head out under under the noonday sun, sometimes noon is the exact right time to take some pictures.
And sometimes the best light-shaping tool is no tool at all.
In the movie “Glengarry, Glen Ross,” a group of hard-driving salesman live by the mantra “Always Be Closing”—ABC. It drives home and distills their life’s goal, their every waking obsession.
If I had to pick something similar for me as a photographer, it would be “always be composing.” By always looking around with an eye toward the light, the shadows, the composition possibilities, the clothing, the…everything, I build a database in my brain that comes in very handy when the time comes to actually press the shutter.
I know I’ll never re-create that missed, fleeting moment that caught me with my camera down. But the next time I’m on the street, or on location, or even in the studio, I know that such missed images are lurking in my subconscious, waiting to help out. It could be a subconscious memory of the way the light hit a person’s cheek years ago, or the way someone folded their arms while talking to a friend. When I press the shutter, it’s because it just “feels right,” and why it feels right is at least partially informed by all the images I’ve stored in my head.
This mental database is also why every photographer takes a different photograph, even with the same subject. It’s what a photographer’s style is all about. We all like and are drawn to different things, so even when we’re walking down the street, we’ll notice and remember different things. And hence, the different styles when it comes time to actually make photographs.
Other people’s visual artwork enters this mental database as well, of course, but it often causes interference and uncertainty unless handled properly. I look at as much work by others as I possibly can, but I try to take away some basic concepts for future consideration. It could be the way a photographer handled fill light, or the way the image was framed. Nevertheless, I may inevitably end up trying to take a similar picture, with results that are neither satisfying nor very good. Sometimes you just have to let your mind attempt some of these, and then move on to the deeper, original stuff that is you.
And if I’m in a rut, feeling like I’ve taken my last good picture, the best thing I can do is wander around without my camera, composing in my head. Eventually I’ll miss a few shots that make me want to pick up my camera and get started again.
Always be composing.