Zonda`s Quest

It only lasts for about thirty minutes after the photo session. Right after that time I start getting protective about my clicks. As I was talking to a friend and showing him some of my photos, I noticed that my older folders had tons of pictures each, most of it errors or pictures I wouldn’t use. It was possible to tell the story of how I got to the result just by showing the “frame-by-frame” attempts. In the end, there were more than 300mb of data in each folder, and only 5% came to use.

As I`m increasingly correcting my photos using on camera resources, I`m able to see, in the screen, if I achieved the intended result or not. Even on a 3in screen it`s possible to judge light, framing, expression, color and focus. Now all I have to do is ask myself two questions:

1. Would you print a 60in version of this picture, hang on the wall and be proud of it?

2. If not, with minor corrections on Photoshop, would you then do it?

It`s all about the path you choose for your pictures. An honorable death as part of the path to acquire a perfect representation of what we dream of (even when awake), a long walk to the “limbus” when a mediocre picture gets published and the world does the work of keeping it in oblivion, or a heartless memory of an error, right there, on your hard drive.

As an amateur photographer, I honestly can`t see a point in keeping dozens of pictures for each photo I try to take, nor I see a reason to try to save an error on Photoshop. What am I, a Photo Doctor Without Borders? How about be thankful for the opportunity to learn, hit the delete, and try again?

I am not a very creative person. That statement by itself is already enough and I can end my work right here, in this black dot.

[sighs] No I can`t.

Last time I organized a photo shoot in my house my friends made me the favor to pose for me and while I took about a hundred different photos (no, I don`t like bursts because I know I`ll have to erase them one by one) only one was selected to be uploaded to 500px.

Why?

I spent a lot of time last week trying to figure out the answer. The photos looked great, the models were astonishing, and the equipment was perfectly set. What did the “Torn” picture had that the other did not?

The Emotion.

According to Wikipedia, emotion “is a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states”.

During the photo shoot I asked my friend (and model) Ana Paula to look upset. We tried about five different expressions and then she got fed up with it. The moment she truly felt it was enough of that (it was about four in the morning), was the moment I got the photo right. She did me a tremendous favor posing and as she is not a professional model nor I`m a professional photographer, things got a little rough on the direction part of the shoot.

This “accident” unveiled a completely new part of photography for me: direction. As I`m pursuing new ways to deal with photography the kind of picture I want to take is changing. A few years ago, I looked at a picture from a technical standpoint alone. Now, that`s the last thing I look for. I want my pictures to express something and one can`t get a model to express a feeling they don`t feel or can`t understand. The way I got good pictures until now was utterly random: my wife posed and I shot. Eventually some picture would reflect the kind of thing I wanted, or not. And I would be frustrated for not understanding what went wrong.

While taking some time during the week trying to learn some techniques, I arranged a new shoot for the weekend. The idea was pretty simple: there was a theme, and based on that I would direct poses, clothing and makeup. What usually was my wife choosing her makeup and outfit was about to become a broader (and potentially disastrous) experiment.

When they got to my house, I was scared to let them down. One does not simply asks two women to wear full make up and fails them. While I usually don`t drink, I thought about the possibility of easing off a bit and took some doses with them. Suddenly I was on the floor, seated, talking to my friend about the impact the hand and fingers lying on the face would have on the final expression. Would it represent desperation, sadness or guilt? Camera in one hand, glass on the other, we debated about the truthfulness of the expression and the unconscious need for shelter that makes people seat on corners when feeling bad. That`s what I wanted. No matter if the pictures were going to be great. They would, surely, be the representation of what we were trying to do that night. While shooting I remember thinking, “oh, the photos are great! Or, maybe, they suck and I`m drunk”. The expressions on their faces looked real. When we started talking about the kind of emotion I was trying to get, it took only some time until I could get it to look like they were really feeling it. The Desperation, The Guilt and The Lust are the result of an honest work of emotions crafted for that moment and, therefore, real in their essence. Let us have truth in wine, and let us have water the day after.

Now that a wrote the title of the text I realize I should`ve thought about making it about using colors or tones of gray (nowadays saying something about Shades of Grey makes you almost an automatic shallow repressed person. The sad thing is that I registered a blog about 3 years before with this title and never used it. Now I probably never will…). But it`s not about that. It`s about photographers and in almost all extent, about people`s behavior.

As I was researching to buy my 50mm lens (I think I never read that much before making a purchase) I dived deep into the corners of the internet, trough it`s forums and other decaying places (like abandoned blogs, even in the other side of the Geocities road). Those forums held extensive discussion about lenses or camera bodies and every other technical specifics existent in our field, and I was amazed to see how diverse were the persons discussing and how polarized were the discussions. So many people from different countries, origins and everyone had a single opinion while everything seemed to be a twofold situation.

As I was discussing on the last post, it`s RAW or JPEG, it`s Canon or Nikon, you`re a pro or you`re a moron. According to what I`ve learned during my research, Sony users are hipsters with no knowledge of photography and LEICA users are rich guys who think they know a lot. The other brands are just there like those blue guys the Power Rangers fight before the real fight begins. That said, if you take photography seriously you must choose between Canon or Nikon…oh, and shoot RAW.

I remember buying my first camera. I didn`t know anything about those technicalities so I bought from the same brand of my previous point-and-shoot: Canon. Moths latter I read about this “war” among users and started to read camera reviews and to see 100% magnified crops from each manufacturer. Yes, there was a small difference. Canon took the road of color rendition on the Rebel Series (so the red was not only red, but a saturated ruby red) and Nikon took the path of sharpness (so the colors were a bit more muted but you could see texture better). It`s not about quality. It`s just about preference. One could`ve taken the others path. The Canon lenses are, in fact, cheaper than it`s Nikon counterparts, however, lot`s of Nikon lenses are superior to Canons in things like rounded aperture blades, that do not affect the image objectively, but do make the background blur more pleasant. It`s plainly stupid to polarize such discussions. I wish I could have a Canon AND a Nikon so I could enjoy all the possibilities. Furthermore, who is paying these people to make so much noise in favor of some brand? I keep asking myself what kind of insecurity do we humans have hardwired in ourselves that urge us to stick to a extreme point of view about things. Stop and think for a moment: is Coke or Pepsi, you are from the Left or Right, it`s American or European cars…

Photography is such a fantastic form of art exactly because it`s not strapped to anything. One can express itself by making almost any form of visual representation. From a trivial brick wall to a photo of a drawing, in a way that expresses not only the drawing, but recreates the moment of the drawing`s making. And yet the focus shifts away from it. We have such fantastic machines that are capable of seen almost 16.000 colors and we, as operators of Canons or Nikons can only see 1.

Since I started caring about “professional level” photography I`ve been reading the Ken Rockwell website. It`s a very controversial piece of website and his opinions, for my delight, frequently enrage the photographic community. I like his style because he`s not afraid to speak out something he believes, even if it goes against all the common knowledge.

Back in 2008 I read something in his site against post processing and against the use of RAW format. It`s a somewhat deeply-held belief that amateurs use the JPEG format and the so-called “pros” use RAW. Without expanding into the particularities of each, RAW retains A LOT more information than the JPEG (in my camera, the RAW file is six times larger than the JPEG) and makes it possible to adjust the picture off camera with softwares like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. From the middle of an opening in the void, comes Ken with a crazy (but somewhat exceptional) assertion: how about you “pros” learn how to shoot so you don`t actually NEED any software adjustments to your pictures?

I remember reading that inside my office while working and laughing loudly while thinking about the next round of flame wars in the internet photography forums. Then it struck me: he is damn right! If one really learns how to use its camera, shoot the subject from the right angle and position, little or no tweak will be necessary. I`m sure the masters of Photoshop will bluntly disagree with me. Too sad I`m discussing photography and not image editing, and yes, I make a very clear distinction among photography and image editing.

With this kind of though I started my path through photography. Six years later I`m what one can call lazy photographer. I want my shots perfect (in the sense of “the way I had them in my mind of better”) straight out of my camera. While I love to shoot, I have to confess: couldn`t care less about channel mixers, layers and so on. The plot twist? I shoot raw, edit and convert it in the camera.

The Eos 60D (and probably all cameras from it`s generation on) have the capability to edit RAW (so you can adjust +1/-1 stop on exposure, light balance, correct lens fallout and distortion) and then convert it to JPEG in camera. To lots of orthodox photographers this is the useless tool ever created by Canon. To me? It`s what I needed from software editing.

While I still think a great photographer with good capabilities on software editing is going to achieve greater results than the one without its computer abilities, I`ve became lazy, and my laziness made me learn a hell lot and improved my capability to take the right picture right on the first click.