Serving it up RAW

Digital cameras make my life difficult. Digital makes beauty passe, especially in colour. A fantastic scene in Trinidad isn't really that wonderful anymore; it's just Photoshop. A flat grey sky magically turned midnight blue by the touch of a slider and the click of a mouse. Extreme efforts to capture a fleetingly unreal moment of a very real scene seem rather silly in these days of imaging chips and computers. Many digital supporters proudly proclaim that the real 'art' in this age of photography is the ability to expertly manipulate an image in Photoshop. I wonder sometimes if digital cameras have made my slide film methods obsolete.

In the good old days, landscape photographers were restricted to the use of a specific number of slide films. These films would have a specific colour palette to suit different tastes. Although photographers would differ in their preferences with regards to the subtle renderings of colour of the different emulsions, the one unifying goal would be that the slide on a lightbox matches the print, or a picture on the internet. That was a source of pride, and was a marker of the photographer's skill and patience where she/he could capture a special moment in time, and wow an audience, by presenting something that was really there, albeit for an instant. Digital cameras and post-processing have undermined the magical reality. Many digital scenes only exist in the photographer's mind, and are brought to fruition in Photoshop. Viewers know this, and are understandably sceptical about a landscape's beauty as portrayed in a picture. Questions are always raised, "Are the colours real?", "Did you use Photoshop?", and others. A devaluation of the landscape's inherent beauty, and of the photographer's skill occurs. Viewers become jaded, saturated by the unrealism. In the end, only nature suffers when photographers fake its magnificence for the sake of a few "ooohs and aaahs". A constant internet barrage of Photoshop-enhanced landscapes breeds a nihilism in the viewing public. Splendour becomes a Photoshop trick. As all the great landscape photographers constantly maintain, the ONLY purpose of landscape photography should be to sensitize the public to the grand landscape all around us. Conservation and landscape photography go together. A great landscape photograph is a plea, an argument, a revelation to the viewer - that should instill in them a want, a need, to protect the environment. Modified photographs erode this lofty goal. There is no zeal to conserve computer-generated landscapes.

I cannot dispute that Photoshop and digital photography represent the new 21st Century means of artistic expression. We can now quite easily create abstracts that conjure powerful thoughts and emotions in viewers: photographs that blur the lines between fantasy and reality. My particular "beef" is with photographs which attempt to convince viewers that what they are seeing came directly out of the camera. Photographers should respect their viewers by offering some semblance of honesty with regards to the manipulations that were performed on any particular image.

Most digital shooters are completely unaware that the jpeg pictures that they take are not true representations of the scene before them. There is a large amount of in-camera processing that takes place to boost saturation, sharpen pictures, and alter colour temperature. Digital purists know that the digital negative resides in the RAW (or NEF, or DNG - depending on the manufacturer designation) file, which is only available in more advanced digital cameras. The RAW file is the true representation of the picture taken by the digital sensor. RAW files typically look dull and soft. The RAW file is but the starting point for the image processing process in Photoshop which turns a run-of-the-mill picture to something extraordinary. Advanced amateurs and most professionals shoot exclusively in RAW mode as these files utilise the full resolution of the sensor without lossy compression found in jpeg files. White point, colour temperature, and other parameters can be altered at the post-processing stage with a RAW file, but not with a jpeg file. Other than a matter of convenience, I think shooting in jpeg mode is a silly practise. Why spend big bucks on a 6, 8, or 10 megapixel camera, and then proceed to throw out all your camera's resolution by shooting in compressed jpeg mode?

A slide or negative is the analogue equivalent to a RAW file. In black and white photography, Ansel Adams stated that the negative was merely the score, while the print was the performance. Black and white prints usually undergo a great deal of dodging and burning in the darkroom to get the effect that the photographer desires. In spite of this, Ansel Adams, for instance, had no problems showing an ugly straight print from a negative versus an adjusted print. No big deal. Similarly, transparencies are the slide shooter's "RAW" files. Slide shooters have to submit their slides for publication, not Photoshop alterations of their slides. So why is it that digital photographers get irritated when I ask to see a particular RAW file? What's the big deal? Viewers have the power. If you find a picture too good to be true, ask the photographer to show you the RAW file - and hear the response. As shown below, here are some of my medium format slides presented "as is" on my lightbox.






Landscape pictures always straddle a fine line between recording a reality, and recording an aesthetic ideal. My goal is to take pictures that look good (to me) using my understanding of aperture, shutter speed, focus, and film. The rest is up to nature to provide - moments that come together for a couple minutes, and then are gone: good light is fleeting. Other photographers use processing techniques to achieve the spectacular. Everyone has their way: serving it up "RAW" is mine.

- November 2006