In this blog I want to discuss my photography philosophy. My philosophy is pretty simple, I photograph what I see. That sounds sort of obvious, doesn’t it? But what I mean don’t fake my images. For me telling a story of a scene as I see it at that point in time. In other words keep the image real.
Now a camera does not see light like humans do. We as humans have a greater range of light than a camera. So if I’m photographing a sunrise I will have to expose for the skyline but when I do that the foreground will be very dark in the image. When I post process the image, I can bring back the light in the foreground. Also, the camera guesses on the colors, for the most part the colors are close to what was actually at the scene. For instance photographing the sunrise the camera has a hard time picking up all the different oranges and reds in the sky, But a few tweaks in post processing to get the colors the same as what I saw when shooting the scene is not a problem.
Why I’m saying all this? I’m more of a purist. I just feel as a photographer I photograph what I see not manufacture an image. If I photograph a scene on a clear day with no clouds I will not add clouds in post processing to make the image better. Or take photograph at dusk and then take another photograph later that night of the milky way and then combine the two images. These photo look great, but it is not what the scene looked like at the time. Nothing wrong with this, it’s just not my style. Now I have used long exposure to bring out the milky way and long exposure for water scenes. But I don’t change the scene in post processing.
It’s a lot easier to add and subtract from a photograph than to keep going to the same place to get that one special photograph. But for me that is the reword to be relentless until you get the image you want in a certain location. As I’m writing this, I have been trying to get a sunrise photograph in the Chiricahua mountains. I have gotten some good sunrise images there but not the one I’m looking for. Tomorrow morning at 5am I will be driving once again out to the mountains to hopefully capture that magical sunrise.
Let me know you thought.
David