Recently, on a hike with two of my friends, a conversation took place about wedding photographers and how soon to be betrothed will go about choosing them. Since we three dabbled in photography, albeit some of us more than the others, the topic was not out of our purview for a conversation.
As I was gasping for air, huffing and puffing, it is my wont in those times to incur “an expenditure of words without an income of ideas”, and blurted out that the new groom and bride are looking for a wedding photographer who can realize the newlyweds dream behind the reality and not the reality per se. So, in this context, the reality is the technical aspects of the photography, the location, the ambience, and even the people partaking in the celebration. And one of my friends chimed in saying the moments and movements captured at the wedding, before, during and after the ceremony is what translates to the dream behind the reality.
That triggered a thought process in terms of capturing an image with props and/or post processing an image. It has been a long-discussed topic that still has some strong proponents and opponents. There is a school of thought that has disdain for heavy post processing an image and then there are those who thrive on creativity offered by post processing techniques, and modern-day tools. The former believe you can realize the dream without going too far into post processing the image using software. They believe it is very gimmicky and lacks the fidelity. Ironically, the software post processing essentially turned out to be the computer driven methods of pre-digital era film development. Even the terms used are almost identical, e.g. dodge, burn, highlights and shadows etc.,
I was recently on a photography tour in Iceland. I was dreaming of capturing some phenomenal landscapes, with blue water, milky white, foamy waterfalls, and fantastic skies. I was ready with the appropriate gear (full format camera with high resolution sensor, UWA lens, ND filters etc), and all I needed was mother nature to cooperate. Then the reality set in. My full format camera died, forcing me to use a backup camera that is no longer full format, and has the lower resolution. Then mother nature frowned upon me. It was raining, and cloudy, with an occasional break in the sky. Th add insult to the injury, my sensor had more dust spots than the population of an island in West Indies. Here is the example of that reality.
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The image below is my dream behind the reality. The question is that am I entitled to my dream or should I stay with reality, albeit “corrected” as shown above?
The third image is “doctored”, as the purists would call it. In this context of post processing an image, doctored implies it is modified from the original as captured by the camera. But the fact remains is that the camera has already doctored the image, technically speaking. The fidelity between the reality and the image has already been compromised. A tenuous argument? Perhaps. But then if it were a creative outcome, then is it not doctored? I am very ambivalent about this question, and I am not sure I will ever find an answer that I can stay true to, anytime soon.
