A conversation with myself

click photo to enlarge
How much should a blogger reveal about themselves? The answer to that question will vary from person to person: some will be happy to be more expansive than others. I always think of myself as a private person, and though I'm fairly free with my opinions in this blog (which blogger isn't!), any details that I include about my personal life tend to be brief and fairly innocuous or non-specific. I deliberately don't speak in any depth about my immediate or extended family. Nor do I write too much about the village community of which I'm a part.

With an outlook like that I do, of course, eschew the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and all of the other social media sites that are so popular today. The idea of documenting the details of my life, important or inconsequential, minute-by-minute and day-by-day is quite alien to me for reasons of time and inclination. The plain truth is I find it difficult enough to respond to comments on this blog, so I really don't know how I'd manage communicating with pseudo-friends through Twitter!

People sometimes ask me why I blog. There are a few reasons that I've mentioned before, largely centred around the idea of a window for my photography and a means of improving it. That usually leads to the next question: "Why do you accompany your photographs with a 'reflection'"? The original thinking was to differentiate my efforts from those of others and to give me a regular intellectual challenge quite different from those I faced in my day job then (and face now in retirement). But as the years have passed I've sometimes come to think of this blog as a conversation with myself: the putting into print of the thoughts that buzz around my head, thoughts which, in the ordinary course of events, would go unheard unless I shared them with friends and family. The fact that quite a lot of people visit PhotoReflect on a daily basis to read them and look at my photographs still surprises me. The fact that relatively few comment doesn't! I appreciate that is down to me being a fairly ineffective blogger - for years I've taken none of the recommended steps to "build my readership". Moreover, I'm not the loquacious type, so the chatty conversations that some bloggers and readers value don't often occur here. But I'm O.K. with that because I'd find it hard to give the blog more attention than it currently gets.

Today's photograph is one of my rare, openly manipulated shots. I took a photograph of myself reflected in the mirror of a lift that opened alongside me when I was photographing the numbers I recently posted in the triptych. The resulting image was symmetrical with strong perspective and me just to the side of the vanishing point. I found myself wishing for a stronger convergence of lines in the photograph and so I added them in the form of "light rays".

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.9mm (37mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.4
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 250
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The ethics of moving leaves

click photo to enlarge
One of my early blog posts briefly discussed the ethics of removing, adding or changing objects within photographs - the practice that has become known as "Photoshopping". This issue is something I've thought about quite a bit in recent years, usually when I've been looking at newspaper images or photographs that have been posted online.

Photographs have been manipulated in one way or another since the advent of the medium, and many take exception to criticism of the practice, asking what the difference is between increasing the contrast of an image and adding a more photogenic sky. I come to this question from the point of view of an amateur who creates photographs that show the world as I find it and as I create it. So, I think that if I'm photographing a landscape and there are telephone wires or parked cars in places I'd rather there weren't, then they stay. But, if I'm photographing a still life I will arrange everything just as I want it. The point where I become a little inconsistent is where I adjust tonality, contrast, saturation, etc. When I do that I've certainly changed how the camera captures the world. My defence is that there is a long tradition of doing this, and it is significantly less manipulative than removing or adding things.

Today's photograph was the prompt for that reflection. It shows large leaves from a London Plane tree on some steps by the River Thames. I selected this particular group because it made quite a good composition against the straight lines and shadows of the concrete. However, as I framed my shot the thought went through my head that I could move the leaves slightly, or find some more colourful examples, or turn over those that were upside down, and in so doing contrive a "better" image. But I didn't. That seemed like "Photoshopping by hand" and if I presented the photograph as an image based on a found circumstance, then it was deceitful. If I'd been photographing these for, say, a commercial advertisement I'd have no qualms about re-arranging the leaves because there is little expectation on the viewer's part that what is seen in an advert is real. But, photographing them with the purpose I had in mind it seemed wrong. I'm sure there are those who agree with me, and I'm equally sure that many think I'm both inconsistent and mad. What do you think?

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 20mm (40mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On