The Photo On The Wall

One of the most critical and difficult tasks in digital photography is also one of the most misunderstood. Managing color is even harder if it isn’t clear what we mean when we are talking about color. I know it is hard, because I have taken college courses in photography where the instructor gave wrong information because she didn’t understand. Well, here goes my shot at explaining what is going on.

First, you have to realize that different people mean entirely different things when they talk about color. Take me, for example. I’m a physicist, so let’s start with that perspective. When I think of color, I think of the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see. The color of the light corresponds to the wavelength, or energy, of the photons flying around in space. There are lots of photons with too much energy to see (ultraviolet light, x-rays, gamma rays for example) and lots of photons with too little energy to see (examples are infrared light, radio waves, brain waves, and electomagnetic waves generated by powerlines). But, as you know since you are able to see your computer monitor and read this, there is a whole bucketfull of photons with just the right energy to stimulate the nerves in our retinas and allow us to see stuff. And to a physicist (or a 4th grader studying rainbows) each of those photons has a color associated with it that depends on it’s energy. For example, we see 510nm photons as green light and 475nm photons as blue light. A photon that isn’t exactly 510nm, say 509nm, will still be green, but a different shade. So, to a physicist, there are many, many colors. All of these colors come streaming to us from the sun and together make up what we call white light.

So how does your printer or computer monitor work? If you’ve thought about it at all, you probably realize that your monitor does not reproduce all the wavelengths of light that were in the original scene you thought was pretty enough to photograph. It turns out that our eyes are sensitive to only three different colors. By taking the three-color input from your eye, you brain can do a pretty good job of imagining what all the colors in a scene are. So your printer or monitor takes advantage of the three-color phenomenon.

They do it differently, though. Monitors radiate light while prints absorb light. Your monitor reproduces different relative intensities of the three primary colors; red, green, and blue. Your eye and mind detect these three colors and reconstruct the original scene. The more levels of red, green, and blue your monitor can reproduce, the more variations in color it can fool you into perceiving.

Printers do a similar trick, but rely on tints to absorb the light that falls on the print. The three primary tints are magenta, cyan, and yellow. Most printers throw in black because it is hard to get the three tints in exactly the right ratio under various lighting conditions to give a good black. Furthermore, you can’t fool your eye into seeing all the colors your brain is capible of interpreting with just three tints and black. So high-end printers add more tints to reproduce a few more of colors at the edge of their printable color gamut and more closely match all the colors your eye can differentiate.

Now comes the hard part. Making the image on the monitor look the same as the original scene, and then making the print look like the monitor. Before you give yourself a headache by banging your head against the wall in frustration, realize that the matching job is more than hard, it’s impossible. You can get close, though.

Calibrate your monitor so the relationship between the image, the monitor, and the printer stays the same. Then use print profiles that you download or make yourself to get predictable printer results. With a little effort and attention to the details, you can make prints that will dazzle your friends and clients. Who knows, you might even impress the toughest judge of all: yourself.

What does it take to make a great photo? Since I’ m a physicist by education, I tend to think of photography as a scientific process. The light comes through the lens, gets focused on the film or sensor, and presto – you have an image. So for years my efforts to improve my pictures were centered around saving up for better lenses, choosing the best film for the shot, and keeping the camera still during the exposure.

Well, precision and quality may make a good image that accurately represents the scene in front of the camera, but I have come to realize that there is a big difference between being a scientist who takes data and being an artist who creates an engaging composition that someone would want to hang on the wall. The suspicion that making great photos takes more than great technical prowess was building in me for a long time, but the concept hit home when I submitted some of my photos for exhibit in our county fair. To my great disappointment, all but one of my pictures was rejected. When I picked up the rejects, the judge told me that the photos were technically perfect, but they lacked passion. I asked her what she meant by passion, but she couldn’t really tell me. We talked about how adding a person to one of the pictures might help (I had gone to great lengths to make sure there were NO people in the shot), but I left without understanding how to put passion into my photographs or even what passion means in a photographic context.

Since then, I have been trying to figure out how to capture that elusive passion. I wish I could just look down a table comparing digital SLRs and find a row for passion. So far no luck on that front. But, then, if creating great photographic works of art was easy, everybody would be doing it. Maybe the way to learn the techniques I need is to talk to people who ARE doing it. Maybe a good approach is to learn from people who buy photos and try to understand what makes them want one picture and not another. Or maybe the best way is to make prints of all of my thousands of images, set up a booth at the local street fair, and see what’s popular. Well, maybe not.

How do you understand that ill-defined quality that must be added to a technically perfect photograph to turn it into a work of art? What are all the factors that work together to make a great print that is begging to be displayed over the sofa?

As I sharpen my focus toward wall-worthy photographs, it helps me to write about my thoughts and insights. So that’s the reason for this blog. I expect that my photography will improve just as a result of thinking through ideas and putting them down on virtual paper. I also expect that the things I write will be merely the start of discussions that will help me and all the readers who contribute.

What articles will you see on this BLOG? All kinds of things. Discussions of equipment for sure. And, of course discussions about all the aspects of making a photograph from the time the idea for a picture first comes to mind through the time the matted and framed print goes on the nail in the wall by the front door. I hope to throw in a few interviews as well. The pervasive theme will be the things that separate snapshots from fine art.

Thanks for visiting. I encourage you to register and join the conversation. I promise I won’t sell your email address or use it for any purpose outside this blog. So sign up, jump in, and check back weekly for new posts.