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.

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.

The one on the left is exposed the way my camera thought it should be. Notice the lack of detail in the shadow areas and the complete washout of the sky. The center image was taken at the same time but underexposed by 1.5 stops. It shows the blue in the sky and even a few clouds. We don’t often get clouds in Southern California, so we want to make sure they show up when we do.  The right image was overexposed by 1.5 stops. If you look carefully, you can see some the beams in the ceiling of the colinnade. Our job now is to take these three images and combine them into one image that shows the elusive clouds AND the woodwork in the ceiling of the colonnade.
One way to get detail in all the important places in this image is to load all three versions into Photoshop, choose HDR from the File:Automate menu, and merge the three 16-bit images into one 32-bit high dynamic range image. This works well and is a great feature of Photoshop. I have trouble with it, though. Since a computer monitor cannot display all 32 bits of dynamic range and my printer cannot print 32-bit images, I have to compress the image back to 16 bits. Photoshop does this for me (go to the image menu, select mode:16 Bits/Chanel) and it will allow you to have some control over the compression process, but it takes more experience than I have to get the detail I want in the places where I think detail is important.
So I use layers and masks to do the deed. As with the HDR automation, I open all three images in Photoshop. Then I copy the underexposed and overexposed images onto the normally exposed image. Make sure your focus is on the image you want to copy, select the entire image (ctrl-a on my PC) and copy it (ctrl-c). Then focus on the correctly exposed image and paste the clipboard into it (ctrl-v). The new image comes in as a new layer. Repeat this for the other image. Now you have one Photoshop file with three layers, the properly exposed background layer, an overexposed layer and an underexposed layer. Right now only the top layer is visible. Select the top layer and make a hide-all layer mask. You can either do this in the Layer menu or hold the alt key and click the mask icon at the bottom of the Layers pallette. Do this for both the imported layers.
Now you should have a properly exposed background that is completely visible because the over- and underexposed layers are masked out. Click on the overexposed layer’s mask, select the brush tool and set the color to white. I generally use a fuzzy brush with about 30% opacity and 30%-50% flow. Then paint (with the mask selected) the areas that you want to make brighter. They will start to appear as you lighten the mask that is hiding the darkest areas.
Then go to the underexposed layer’s mask and do the same for the areas that are too bright in the background. If you make a mistake, either go back in the history pallette or make black the foreground color and paint over your mistake. By varying the size and hardness of your brush, you can have absolute control over the areas you want to lighten or darken. You can also use curves or levels layers to tweak the different layers or the composite image.
I tried this with the three photos above. Here’s the result:

The sky is probably a little more dramatic than I would make it for a print. I wanted to make sure you get the idea.
Have you used this technique? Do you prefer some other technique? Leave a comment and let me know.

But, there’s more to it than that. Some of the time the dynamic range of the light in front of the lens is greater than the dynamic range of the film or the sensor behind the lens. Take this photo of a colonnade at Mission San Juan Capistrano for example. The image is exposed properly as far as the computer in my camera is concerned. But anybody can see that the sky is an overexposed white blob and the ceiling in the colonnade is so underexposed that there is absolutely no detail. In these cases you have to choose what part of the photo will be properly exposed. You might choose to emphasize the highlights and loose whatever detail is in the shadows. That is a good thing if you want to make a sillouette, but a bad thing when you think you’re photographing Aunt Mary with the sunset in the background and it turns out that you can’t see anything but her outline superimposed on a beautiful orange sky. I don’t know your Aunt Mary, but mine wouldn’t appreciate a photo of her sillouette. Alternatively you may decide to preserve the shadow detail and sacrifice the bright areas like most of my vacation pictures that have white space where the sky should be. Or somewhere in between.

There are several ways to address this dilemma. One way is to rely on your camera’s internal meter and hope everything comes out OK. You may get lots of good shots this way, but I doubt you’ll get a very high percentage of the great shots that will end up on the wall. Another way is to use a spot meter and measure the different brightness levels in your scene. Then adjust the exposure so that the brightest part of the photo that you aren’t willing to sacrifice is at the top of the brightness your camera sensor or film can accept. I like this way better because it gives me more control (maybe I should say creative control – that sounds cool, doesn’t it?) over the way the picture comes out.

That’s not the way I do it, though. I bracket a lot. I nearly always carry a tripod with me so I can take the exact same picture three times with different exposures. I usually set it to take one picture at the proper exposure, one that is 1.5 stops underexposed, and one that is 1.5 stops overexposed. (This is using a digital camera. Back in the old days when I shot film, I would typically bracket plus and minus one-third of a stop.) Look at the two images here. The one on the left is overexposed to show the detail of the ceiling and the one on the right is underexposed to put the clouds back in the sky. In some extreme cases, I have been known to change the middle exposure and take another set of three just to increase the likelihood of getting great definition at every light level in the eventual print. That probably would have been a good idea in this case. It’s a good idea to check the histograms for all three images to make sure you are capturing the full dynamic range of the scene you are photographing.

Of course, having one OK image and two lousy images on my hard drive doesn’t do much but take up space. The images have to be combined somehow into one picture that has good definition at every exposure level. I know of a few ways to do this. One is to use Photoshop’s High Dynamic Range feature. It combines all the bracketed images into one. You can also squeeze more dynamic range out of a RAW image using Photoshop’s Camera Raw, the software that came with your camera, or some other conversion software. A third way, and the method I typically use, is layers and masking. Read why I like this method and how to do it in the High Dynamic Range post.

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.

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