Reality and illusion

click photo to enlarge
In the days before the dark arts of digital manipulation through programmes such as Photoshop many people held the view that "the camera never lies". It was taken as self-evident that a photograph was a factual representation of a scene. Yes, if it was in black and white then clearly the colour had been drained from it, but if it retained colour then what you saw was, people believed, the truth. In fact, "the camera never lies" was never a particularly useful statement because the meaning carried by every photograph is, in some way, altered by both the photographer and the medium. And of course, even in the days of film, deliberate deception was possible in photography. Multiple images could be blended into one, tricks with people and objects near and far could be constructed, people could be erased from photographs, and much else could be done to deceive the viewer.

Today almost anything is possible and "Photoshopping" of one sort or another is widespread. Sometimes the viewer is aware of the alterations, at other times they are not. Yet many photographers - I count myself one of them - prefer to limit their manipulation to essentially those things that were possible with film: tricks such as dodging, burning, adjusting contrast, removing dust on the film/sensor etc. Such people also often prefer to find real scenes that have the ambiguity necessary to deceive the viewer, to make them scratch their head and wonder quite what is going on, rather than spend time altering a photograph using the computer to achieve that effect.

The other day I walked past some wooden fencing in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. It screened a site that is earmarked for development. The fencing has been there for a while, and the economic downturn seems to be extending the period that it is needed. There are painted patterns on the plywood boards and photographs of local scenes, devices that aim to make the utilitarian structure a little more palatable and a little less grim. When I stood and looked at different sections of the fencing the possibility of a few "deceptive" or ambiguous shots came to mind. The first photograph that I took is shown above. It doesn't take long to work out what is going on, but at first glance it is a little puzzling - rather like the bull in the lorry of a few days ago.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm
F No: f7.1 Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Blogger image backgrounds and those rings

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Many people have increasing concerns about the power, reach and intrusiveness of Google. Blogger is owned by Google and is one of their many free offerings. From the time I started using it in 2005 there has been the facility to add advertisements to a Blogger blog and for the blogger to make money (usually very small amounts) from so doing. The Google word for this is "monetize", a horrible construction. I've never had the desire or need to do so, and this blog is advertisement-free, a situation I don't foresee changing. Of course part of this process involves Google making quite a bit of money from the advertisements, based on key-words, that are placed in the blog. Consequently I suppose that by not using advertisements I'm taking advantage of Google's benevolence. But, they don't seem to mind so neither do I.

I do wonder, however, if Google has its ear closer to the ground than even the conspiracy theorists imagine. In the Comments of a very recent post there was an exchange of views concerning the effect of the white background that accompanied the enlarged view of a photograph. On some subjects it doesn't work very well, is overpowering, and is at odds with the black background of the blog pages. Well, quite soon after that date the background to enlarged photos was changed to black. Were Google listening in, or was it one of the planned incremental changes that are regularly rolled out? Whatever the reason - and it hasn't been trumpeted anywhere by Google that I've noticed - I like it. And, at the risk of pushing my luck I'd like to suggest that it be retrospectively applied to older posts too.

All of which has nothing to do with today's photograph of abseiling workmen on Tower Bridge in London. I spotted them as we walked past the other day. They appeared to be doing something electrical, perhaps installing the enhanced lighting that will illuminate it during the Olympics. I read that, in addition, a set of large, illuminated Olympic rings will hang from the bridge during the Games. When I first heard of this proposal I tried to imagine a worse combination of the insensitive and the tawdry. But I couldn't.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm (plus crop)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 1000
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A lesson from Victorian photograph albums

click photo to enlarge
The other day I was looking at a couple of Victorian albums that contain photographs of some of my wife's ancestors. As I turned the pages, looking at the sepia and hand-coloured images of men and women posing in photographers' studios, I reflected that a print is still the best way of archiving family snaps. The dress of the people in these photographs - men in suits or military uniform, women in their finery, and children dressed like miniature adults - are of a style that suggests most of the shots are from the second half of the nineteenth century, with some from the early 1900s. And yet these photographs, of which many are well over 100 years old, still look clear, sharp, and for the most part show little evidence of fading.

When I shot 35mm film my final images were either black and white, colour prints, or colour transparencies. I converted to digital photography in 2000. During that first year I made an album, printing photographs of different sizes on a single sheet of paper, and captioning them. I'm ashamed to say that since that time my printed output has declined substantially. Like many photographers my archives remain digital. I keep RAW files ordered by date and location, and processed files by date and caption. I do print images but these are usually larger format for display - from 10x8 inches up to 13x19 inches, and very occasionally a few 6x4 inches snapshots. There are those who argue that digital archives are the easiest and best way of storing photographs, and for keen amateurs and professionals that is certainly so. But for the average person (and the keen amateur and professional), who might well want the images to pass down through future generations as a piece of family history, I can see them being next to useless. No, for that purpose you can't beat durable prints, because they require no special (or maybe obsolete) equipment to view them, and are so easy to access.

However, there is one additional item that is guaranteed to make them last longer, and be valued more highly by your descendants, and that is an expensive, attractive and durable album. Had the prints in today's photograph been stored in shoe boxes I very much doubt whether they would have survived beyond a few decades. But, in leather-bound albums with metal clasps, mounted in frames on gold-leaf edged pages, they became objects of fascination and beauty, repositories of the family's past, and heirlooms to be cherished. The albums shown above have all those qualities and more, and yet they lack one vital finishing touch: they aren't captioned. This is a small tragedy. Some have a few notes about the people shown, written in pencil on the back. But the rest are anonymous except for those that an aged relative was able to identify before she died.

So, my recommendation to photographers is "look to the future now". The images we make that are most significant to our families are those of relatives and friends. Print those shots, bind them well, caption them carefully, and you'll earn the gratitude of generations not yet born. There's only one problem with me dispensing exhortations of this sort: I'll now have to make a start on following my own advice!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On