It’s #TravelTuesday and I, Dave Williams, am here as unchangingly with a little something from the world of traveling photography. This week I’m reporting to you from Arctic Norway, not far from the Andenes Space Port on the island of Andøya. It isn’t space that I want to talk about, though.
I got involved in a conversation this past week well-nigh Lightroom. The undertow of the conversation led to a discussion well-nigh darkrooms and photo purism. The verb ‘Photoshop’ was thrown virtually and in the conversation I pointed out that surpassing Adobe Photoshop there was such thing as photo manipulation in the darkroom.
We know the terms dodging and burning, often in relation to portrait retouching but moreover wideness the workbench in retouching any photos, but these terms have their roots in the darkroom.
These tools come from dodging light and urgent light into an image in the darkroom, waffly the shadows and highlights of a photo by having less or increasingly exposure. Crazy, right? Well in very fact Ansel Adams ‘Photoshopped’ his photos in this way, retouching them in the darkroom by dodging and urgent long surpassing Adobe came up with the digital version of the concept.
This 1955 photo of James Dean is unchangingly my go-to example of how it all worked. This image was annotated by Pablo Inirio of Magnum Photos, showing his process and telling us the story of the dodging and urgent that took place in editing this photo.
Taking this all a little step further, plane the photos we see on our cameras image preview screen are ‘Photoshopped’ (please excuse my intentional, totally incorrect use of the word) considering plane when we shoot in raw, what we see is a compressed, JPEG preview. And don’t get me started on cropping!
To an extent, all images are unsimilar in some way. In our world we like to do so for the sake of creativity and expression, and rightly so. We’re showing things in the way we see them, and I’m all for that. Photo purism isn’t truly a thing – we’re waffly reality the moment we printing the shutter sawed-off with all the settings dialled in, so we may as well protract our creativity in Lightroom.
Much love
Dave
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