Why Study the Masters? #3
Today’s answer: To realize how you were photographing.
That answer may sound a bit odd, but bear with me. During our trip earlier this year to Yosemite, Ann and I spent the latter part of our last morning along the trail to Mirror Lake (though we barely made it down the trail). It was where I took my spill (the damage to body and camera body still lingers on) and where I thought I was in photographic heaven - until I looked at my images at home. I was resoundingly disappointed. That was until this morning when, while studying Quiet Light, one of John Sexton’s images made me realized that I had actually been photographing in black and white, not color, that morning. So, once again, I set the book down and headed over to my computer.
The image was of several tree trunks in front of a wall that made me think of one of my images. Mine is much less interesting with a single very, vertical tree instead of the three curving trunks in the Quiet Light image, and the contrast range in my image appears much greater than the one in the book. Nevertheless, John Sexton’s image suggested to me what I needed to do to my own.
So I converted my image to black and white, and carried on with the lesson learned earlier about decreasing contrast to give a richer fidelity to the midtowns of the image. Often contrast seems to give punch to an image - but it’s way too easy to go overboard with it. Even now I may have to tone this image down a bit.
When I finished working on that image to some degree of satisfaction, I started looking at other images from that part of the morning, quickly converting them from color to black and white to see how they translated. Sure enough, unlike many instances when the image is truly a color image and appears lifeless in black and white, these images reached out and said, “Work on me!” So I did.
What struck me is that several of the images that had interesting trees that had attracted me when I was there, seemed to lose impact in color - for some reason the tree became lost. But in black and white the forms regained their prominence.
Sometimes other aspects of the image were lost with the color, but what was gained in black and white was worth it.
Some of the images I’d ignored in color because they didn’t evoke any emotion, but on re-inspection warranted exploration in black and white.
The same held true for the photographs of the rocks in the snow. Obviously, the tonal differences between snow and pretty much anything else asks for black and white, but one image totally shocked me. I hadn’t bothered to convert this one image to black and white because the bush’s leaves had appeared to visually merge with the rock behind it. However, when I did my quick conversion check, the leaves appeared as if by magic. It was almost as if I’d applied a green filter in my old film days to make the green leaves lighten up.
These images made me realize that, at least during that part of the morning, I must have been seeing in black and white, but not knowing I was.
Sometimes, even images that worked well in color worked equally well (though somewhat differently) in black and white.
And then, there were those images that I knew could go either way, depending on what I wanted the image to convey.
I guess I really do need to keep working on my black and white image making and, more importantly, developing skills. It’s pretty shocking to think that all of this would have passed me by if I hadn’t been studying Quiet Light, or if I’d been too bothered to stop what I was doing and head to the computer.
Sometimes sitting down with a cup of coffee to study photographs means stopping after only a few minutes to go work on your own images. I guess that’s not a bad thing, is it?