I like photography. Why, I often ask myself. Is is because it gets you out into the open air? Is it because it is a bottomless pit of spending opportunities to get the kit that you need or think you need? Am I ever satisfied with the photos I take? All good questions and none have a particularly easy answer.
I started my interest in photography when I was about twelve. My dad liked photography, and he did think that the opportunities to spend money applied to him. In a household that rarely had much money he always had a desire to buy a new piece of kit. I was given (allowed to use) a camera, cheap but it had all the knobs and dials that more expensive cameras had. I leant about film speeds (ASA) and the positives and negatives of each type, grain (not wheat seeds); how to use a light meter and how to translate that reading onto a camera. I cannot remember taking many photos, but I enjoyed the process and helping my dad with developing and printing the results of his photography, all in black and white. Was he any good? There is something about a black and white photo that makes it compelling. Yes, I believe, it is easier than colour exposures but it still needs composition to make good enough to frame and hang on a wall. His photos were technically proficient, well he was an engineer so they would be, but wall hangable? I cannot recall. Is photography and artform or just a science.
It is a science! To understand how to take light waves and turn them into a picture no matter what the strength of light in the surrounds; the colour of the subject; when to increase or decrease the aperture, the hole that the light flows through and for how long to open the shutter, shutter speed; that is the science part. Get any part wrong and that is where science fails. I have just come back from a photographic adventure, or misadventure to take close up photos of objects at Shingle Street. I wanted to blur the back ground so I had a wide aperture. I had selected aperture priority (the camera decides the shutter speed) and was surprised by the very fast shutter speeds the camera calculated. Half way through my misadventure I decided to check the ISO after viewing the captured pictures on the camera screen. This was far higher than I usually select and I recall that I had raised the ISO to check the sharpness of the lens inside my house in poor light. I have never been convinced that this lens was ever tack sharp. I was wrong. Even at wide apertures at the focused length, it could not have been sharper. It should be it was a Nikon prime lens and it is expected. So my misadventure resulted in a lot of blown out pictures. Not very scientific or was that just where science can go wrong. I think science to be right the mantra is check and check again, a bit like photography. Observation of a scientific phenomenon has to be checked to make it real. An unexpected result of pressing the camera shutter has to be checked to understand why it happened. In science it is checking the available facts to prove the phenomenon. In photography it is checking the camera settings to understand the unexpected result.
So a science it is, yes but where it leaches into an artform is in what you include in the frame of the lens, and how and when to use the available science to add another dimension to your artform. Of course you can remove all the science and just rely on the camera. Modern cameras do not use film, unless you want to use a camera that does. Sometimes with a digital camera it can decide which are the right settings and there nothing to decide. Just point and shoot. Even professional cameras, and by this I include cameras that are £2000 plus when you purchase them, have a point and shoot option. Why would you spend that amount of money for a professional camera and just press just the shutter, unless you are as rich as Croesus and money is not an issue. You may as well go onto Amazon and pay £100 pounds for a camera that just point and shoots. The science is about how you use the settings on your camera and understanding what each function will do and how to control them and how they interact together. The art part is how you use those settings or any accompanying accessories to make a pleasing image. To me, for the moment, the science is the fun part of photography. I have yet to decide whether I have the appropriate artistic nous to produce a good photo, but I am sure going to make sure that I have the science part sorted, by checking my settings.
So where do photography and art cross over or are they synonymous with each other. If you look at art, a painting, then the image is what the artist had in mind when he started, whether he had a scene to paint, someone sitting for him, or just something from his head. Look at Picasso surely his models did not reflect the abstract nature of the image. If they did then they needed to get to the doctor quickly, Most of that which appears in his paintings must have come straight from his mind. I could never see the beauty of his images but many people do and that is their choice. It is a similar with photography, why the photographer took the image of that scene or model at that time with those settings is known only to him, unless he has a video blog on YouTube and is prepared to tell you the reason; some do and sometimes at some length. Many photos are abstract, not the Picasso type of abstract, but a image of, how can I couch this, disconnected objects or a scene where it is not exactly obvious at first glance what it is and how you should view it. That is the thing with a photo, straight off the sensor it will reflect reality but only in 2 dimensions. It may be a blurred reality if the photographer, or artist as I think they need to be called, uses a long exposure to turn a sea, or river, or waterfall into a milky smooth representation of why was in their viewfinder. This type of photo is very much an artistic representation of reality. Still a bit of science in there because the photographer needs to understand how to change the equipment or how long to let the light hit the sensor and what other controls need to be changed to ensure a correct exposure.
In modern day, with a photo being an electronic file you do not have to get it all right in the camera. There is a thing called post processing and with our new friend AI, or artificial intelligence, you can take your photo file and manipulate it so that it looks more artistic or to change it so that it looks better. On a recent workshop I found that the one goodish’ photo I had taken was spoilt by my back pack and drinking flask lying in the foreground. I obviously had not noticed otherwise I would have removed the offending articles. But it was not an issue. In Lightroom, the pretty much ‘go to’ app for post processing, we were able to remove the back pack and it was replaced with some heather to complete the scene. Does this take away the artistic nature of a photo. No, or course not, if Constable painted a scene and on reflection felt that a branch of a tree spoilt his painting, his image, he would have painted it out. Now the photographer is nearly on a par with the painting type artists. If they see something that spoils their image, for example the sky not reflecting what they saw with their own eye then they can change the exposure or contrast of that bit of their artwork to reflect their seen scene. It does not always work, and many images will languish on their computers, unused in whatever way they use they manage their work.
Science or art, very much both, although I lean more towards art. A badly composed image will always be a badly composed image, despite what you can do in post processing. Some would argue with that view and in which case I would say, go ahead, argue, just not with me!
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