Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
-- Michelangelo
Everybody takes pictures. The snapshots, the family photos, the vacation pictures are all part of our lives. Back in Lesson six I talked about Uncle Charlie's Curse -- that the mass consumer market is a huge influence on how photography is put into practice. The expectations of that consumer market influence how professional photographers do their jobs. And it's going to influence how and what I teach in this course. It's something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. Throughout this semester I'm going to teach you to do things that I personally never do. I'm going to show you tools and methods to manipulate your photos that I myself never use. In other words I'm going to give in to the pressure of the mass market and teach you how to do what everybody else does because that's what everybody else does. This choice causes me considerable anxiety. As a teacher my instinct is to say -- no scream, "Yes, that's what everybody does and everybody is WRONG!! THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!!"
I can't win this one. I'm not, for example, going to stop all my students from editing photos on their laptops. I can't make all my students unload iPhoto from their computers or never download Google's Picasa. I have to accept that there are levels of participation in photography that are in their own way and place appropriate and that I can still make a contribution and help people who want to function on those levels to take better photographs. And that means teaching them how to do things that I myself would never do. I should have been a math teacher; it'd be so much easier.
So this chapter is my line in the sand. On one side of that line is excellence and on the other side is compromise. I'm not sure how much compromise is appropriate in a college class, and so my anxiety. My high school librarian Fr. Lanahan repeatedly told us that there was no shame in compromise and that most of us would have to join the "professions" as someone had to keep the world going round. But we should all nonetheless aspire to excellence and scholarship and hold that aspiration in our hearts all our lives.
This is how you do it:
- Use a camera that provides exposure control access and saves RAW data files.
- Learn to use the camera.
- Capture your images as RAW files.
- Transfer your RAW files to a computer equipped with a well calibrated high quality display.
- Use a RAW file converter to process your images to 16 bit RGB photos.
- Get it right in the RAW converter.
- Fine-tune the 16 bit RGB photo in Photoshop and do any pixel level editing as required.
- Convert the finished photo to 8 bit RGB for final output.
- Excellent!
Compromises:
- Use a camera with limited or no exposure control access -- your typical point & shoot digital camera. This compromise will prevent you from setting exposure parameters that deviate from the camera's programming. The camera's programming often produces a mediocre or even faulty result. Occasionally it wins one.
- Use a camera that only saves JPEG files. In this case the software in the camera is going to take the raw sensor data and process it for you by applying a sequence of proprietary algorithms to produce the final JPEG. A camera processed JPEG is at best mediocre, usually damaged to some degree and never as good as you could do by hand. Often it's just a complete screw-up.
- Transfer the photos to a laptop or computer with a poor quality uncalibrated display. If you can't see; what can I say.
- Attempt to edit the already processed JPEGs from the camera. STOP! Why in heaven's name are we trying to fix mistakes that we should have prevented in the first place? It is possible to edit and improve a camera JPEG and much of this course will be devoted to learning how. But what a compromise this is! Do we really want to adopt a procedure wherein the final step is to try and repair avoidable damage that we did earlier on? Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!!
- Mediocre!
Working professionals are affected and the mediocrity of automation has become an established way of doing business. The typical wedding photographer today is expected to shoot 1,000 plus photos and the bride and groom expect to be able to view those photos on the Internet from their honeymoon suite. Automation in this case is the essential engine driving massive production. The disturbing flip side of this is in the answer to this question: With all the automation stripped away, could that wedding photographer still produce even a mediocre photograph? I know the answer now in many cases is: no. When the automation breaks down and we can't proceed nonetheless, we have a problem.
I'm not advocating Luddism. I'm one of the earlier adopters of digital photo technology and I use the latest and most sophisticated digital cameras and software. I use automation, but never without knowing how it's working and what it's doing. I avoid the automation that will degrade my work. It's really about being in control. We don't have to reject the machines and software that make our lives easier but we must understand how they work and we must retain control. Is it our photograph or did we just happen to be there when the machine made it?
Excellence takes time; it is as Michaelanglo said, "no trifle." The skills required to produce excellence come only through hard effort, study and practice. In too many ways our society has turned its back on excellence in exchange for the massive production and ease of the automatic engine. It is a Faustian bargain that undermines even our institutions of higher education. I am anxious and Fr. Lanahan is rolling in his grave.