Every once in awhile I find it useful to stop and think about what digital image editing has made possible.  We go out and shoot and then bring the digital files home to the computer.  They are brought up in Photoshop or some other editing program.  In many cases the image is supposed to be pretty close to what was seen.  Contrast might be enhanced a bit, the brightness of the image raised or lowered a little, color is corrected and the image is sharpened.   The image is now ready to go and it does look rather like the original scene.  In other words, what was done was pretty much the digital counterpart to what might have been done in the darkroom a generation ago.

I put an image in my last post that was approached, from the very outset, in a radically different way.  Here’s the final image:

As I said at the time, I had taken the long route to the library.  This took me past a local hospital.

As soon as I saw this I knew what the final image would be.  It was virtually instantaneous.  No question arose about whether that final image was possible, the only questions were whether the clouds and light would still be good after I had gone home and come back with the camera (note to self: always take the camera with you).  They were.  I got this additional image to serve as a background.

I pulled the skyway out of the one image, put it in the other and masked out the ends of the skyway.  It took less than an hour.  What I imagined before taking any photographs was very similar to what I ended up with.

My studio (our daughter’s old room) is on the second floor of our house and I can see lots of trees out the window.  The light was coming up nicely early this morning and I could see that it would be possible to have a shot that emphasized the diagonal strip of light.  Here is what came out of the camera:

This was not what I had in mind.  I had envisioned a lot more contrast between the lighted area and the background.  I knew it wouldn’t show properly in the image as taken, it was  matter of going to Photoshop to complete the image as imagined.  I hadn’t envisioned it as a black and white image, that was a possibility that arose when I got into Photoshop.  Here is the result:
The point of all this is to say that where in the days of film imaginative exploration of what could be done with an image once it came out of the camera was pretty limited unless one were very skilled in the darkroom.  Now, in many but not all cases,  it isn’t much of a hop at all to go from  what we see in our heads to what we see in the final image.

It is unfortunate that the noun Photoshop has been turned into a verb (Photoshopping) and that new word is pejorative.  If one is out to document what was there, it is acceptable to color correct, add or reduce contrast change the brightness and sharpen, all within limits.  If on the other hand, the intent is to show something about the photographer’s emotional reaction to the scene or if what is photographed is to become a set of elements available for inclusion in an imagined final scene, all bets are off on what is included, excluded or changed.

I for one think of myself as a visual poet.  I’m not a documentary photographer.  The photograph as taken is grist for the image that will result.  I don’t always mention what I did because it is usually quite beside the point.  But if you ever have a question about the faithfulness of the images you see here to the image that was stored in the camera, feel free to ask.  I’ll tell you exactly what I did.  So I will leave you with this:

The possibility of doing digital image editing has been a real Godsend to me.  I’ve always lived in my imagination and the possibility of realizing some of that imagining means a lot.