Once I was teaching a class and held up a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. I asked the class what it was. They all immediately answered, “The Golden Gate Bridge!” I had to correct them, “No, it isn’t the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge.” The point was that there is a big difference between the reality of the bridge a picture of the bridge. The photo brings to mind an object, but it isn’t the object. What, exactly, is the difference between a photograph of something and the thing itself? That sounds like a silly question, but I think it is helpful to discuss the answer.

For one thing, a photo is two-dimensional. The world is three-dimensional. You can’t use depth perception to tell what is near and what is far in a photo. Because nothing is nearer or farther than anything else. It’s all on the paper in front of you. You surely can’t move your head to see what is behind that bush or stand on your tiptoes to look over the fence.

The picture is static. Most of the time the thing you’re photographing is moving. OK, so the Golden Gate Bridge doesn’t move much, but the cars and walkers on it do. So do the waves and boats underneath and the birds, airplanes and occasional clouds overhead. And so does almost everything else we photograph. A photograph captures a moment in time. I guess that’s why they call it a snapshot.

There is no perspective from peripheral vision when you’re looking at a photograph. If you didn’t get it in the frame, nobody will be able to turn their heads and see it. You can’t see the grandeur of Yosemite in a photograph of Bridal Veil falls. If you were standing there, you could turn around and see El Capitan and Yosemite Falls. But not in a photo.

The color of a photograph is always different than the color of the original scene. That’s because the sun shines with an entire spectrum of colors (remember the rainbow?) and a picture uses a combination of three colors and black to fool your eye into thinking the colors are there. Not to mention the transformations that take place in your camera and your computer. Your brain doesn’t see the colors that are there, anyhow. You don’t notice that fluorescent lights are greener than sunlight or that incandescent lights are yellower. Your brain does a little photoshopping of its own to make you see the scene the way it thinks it ought to be.

A photograph cannot capture the entire dynamic range of most of the things we photograph. You can see bright sunlight and deep shadows when you look into the Grand Canyon. Your camera will either wash out the brights or make the dim areas black unless you use special techniques to capture both in different exposures.

What is the purpose of a photograph? To capture a memory? To show someone else what we have seen? I think the photo should be true to the memory, not to the original thing itself. It should portray, not only the lines and colors, but the feeling you got when you were there and saw the thing you decided to take a picture of because you wanted to remember it. So I believe you should adjust your print to reflect your memory of the scene, not the actual scene. Especially since you can’t hope to get the thing you saw onto the paper exactly as the way it really was anyhow.