He said, “I guess it comes down to just taking good pictures.” I thought for a moment. “Actually, it’s a two-part process. You take a good picture, then you make a great picture.”
He replied, “I don’t get it.” I explained the following…
Really good photography is based on sound technical execution, and it requires an expressed vision. By vision I do not mean dust-free exposures or fully focused shots; those are components of execution. Instead, vision is the photographer’s imagination, sometimes called creativity, come to life as an exposure that satisfies the norms of a sound technical image. Imagination is the overall process in individual experiences of seeing something with your eyes then determining how to capture it in interesting, effective composition.
When imagination is put into motion, the scene is interestingly composed, light is artistically managed, the best lens used, and the optimal camera mode utilized. Vision certainly gets you to the exact photographic vantage point to take the picture that subsequently puts you on a path to make that picture great. Here, straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) is the ideal creative act. In most photographic genres, SOOC as the fully optimized exposure is seldom possible or achievable. In other words, if taking the picture is where I begin, within that part of my experience I am typically unable to give the viewer the finished image right out of the camera. Instead, my picture-taking mental model first ensures that my handheld computer with aluminum and glass mounted on its front can record all the optimized scene data I as artist will ultimately need in editing.
If the camera as scene recorder was properly configured, then the mechanical limitations of the camera as device will ensure I have all the information I need to go through editing and produce the image that satisfies my vision. It’s about data. No data, no artistry.
With the image off the camera memory card, we enter editing or more commonly called, post-production. This next phase is crucial and without care is where many aspiring pictures begin to fail as art. Many budding photographers think of post-production as the phase where their flaws are fixed. Actually, “fixing” should be replaced with “liberating.” Liberating what? We return to the notion of vision: what YOU see in your imagination when you point a lens at the subject. Seeing—first with your mind, then your eyes. In practical terms this is art-making…not photojournalism.
This brings us to the closing: what is obtained is the vision that should emerge from editing. Editing liberates the artist’s vision from the data mass that is the scene. Liberation is attributed to Michelangelo, perhaps inaccurately, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” The scene data is the marble medium and the angel is what the photographer successfully extracts from the editing process. Ideal editing is not merely image correction, but the phase where the vision in the artist’s imagination is extracted—liberated, from the scene. To distil: good photographic art is taken. Great art is made.
