Interpreting Reality

With photography, I don't ever claim to capture reality. Instead I interpret it. I'm presenting to you what I see in the scene before me - and sometimes, what I want to see. The degree of manipulation that goes into making photographs has been the subject of debate ever since its origins. I'm on the side that says the minute you decide where to point your camera, you've started editing the wide reality before you.

So here's an example from the other night when I went out to shoot the aurora.  I drove up to a dark, south-facing spot on the Otago Peninsula and as soon as I turned my truck lights off, this is pretty much what I saw:



Darkness. Not the most impressive aurora, just a barely discernible green glow above the cloud on the horizon but I knew my camera would reveal more with a longer exposure. Here's a stitched panoramic shot of the scene with the aperture wide and about a 30 second exposure:



There was a very red moon out that night, providing just enough detail on the ground to give a little foreground interest and depth to the picture. But I'm not happy with it. In my head, the sky was much more blue, there was more ground detail and contrast. So I wanted to apply a bunch of global adjustments in Lightroom: Saturation and vibrance, sauturation in the blues and aquas, clarity and lighter shadows.

Then I added a few local adjustments on the ground: mainly more clarity and contrast - until I arrived at something more like the picture I had in my head:



Not reality, but my interpretation of it.

Last week, interpreting the scene really helped dig me out of an embarrassing hole. I did a quick commercial shoot in a business. All was well back in the office until I realised in my key shot, I'd positioned myself where an unfortunate piece of foreground material appeared prominently in the crotch of one of my subjects. I won't show you the picture. I'll just say Photoshop's content aware fill and some painstaking cloning came to the rescue. The client thought the pictures were great.

I don't mind admitting I'm not perfect. But I try to make my pictures a perfect representation of what's in my head.