Posts
One of the problems in photography is that unless we have a frame of reference (better looking images), we often can't see the faults in our own images. It's rather like that image I showed a week or so ago and some 'nice' person pointed out that he could see a pig in the rock formation - prior to his comment I'd seen nothing, now I can't get past the pig image - thanks again, by the way!
Similarly I have been at workshops where photographers show images which are grossly oversharpened - it's the first thing you see, and you wonder how it was that they didn't.
The good news is that like the pig, once they see flaws for themselves, they will never forget and future images won't be oversharpened.
This logic applies to a number of areas in photography, whether it's compositional faults or subtle highlights (or lack thereof), to colour balance and saturation issues, to print darkness and too much contrast, in fact to all aspects of imaging. Often we are stuck because we haven't seen and we need someone to point out where we are wrong and perhaps too what we could do to fix it.
I think that more often we suffer from not seeing the problem than we do not knowing how to solve it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
George,
I had just been thinking along (and posting on) very similar lines--related to writing rather than photography. I came at it from a slightly different perspective, however. I think we all need honest, tough, trusted critics because we are gifted with (or have developed) varying degrees of skill in the realm of self-assessment.
While I'm sure we can hone our skills, I think there will always be blind spots to one degree or other.
Often we are stuck because we haven't seen and we need someone to point out where we are wrong and perhaps too what we could do to fix it.
Slightly off topic, but I saw an interview with Quentin Tarantino the other night in which he pointed out that artists never make mistakes. They may do something well, or it may be quite bad, but it is never wrong.
Something with that resonated with me.
As for the topic at hand, it seems to me that we're often too close to a particular photograph for proper perspective, whether it be content, sharpening, or print quality. I think this was brought up before on your blog, but our history with an image can be a stumbling block.
We not only NEED a third-party perspective, we have to be willing to listen and act. For my part, I have two pix in my portfolio that others have said were rather weak, but I just cannot seem to lose them. To me they look perfect both in tonal range and in content. I think that, were to step aside myself, I would realize that they're right.
Post a Comment