Occasionally at art festivals a visitor to my booth will point to one of my photographs and ask, \u201cIs that what your camera saw?\u201d\u00a0 This question points out a common misunderstanding about the physics and art of photography.<\/p>\n
Those of us who are serious about our photography capture our digital images in RAW file format.\u00a0 That\u2019s a format that does a minimal amount of processing on the image before it saves it to the memory card.\u00a0 It is more like what the camera sees.<\/p>\n
The other format is\u00a0 JPEG and is not what the camera sees but rather a highly processed image that is controlled to a large extent by the settings the photographer sets in the camera \u2013 settings like sharpness, contrast and saturation.\u00a0 So if the photographer likes saturation he just has to up the saturation setting in the camera.<\/p>\n
JPEG is much closer to the photographs that were captured in the wonderful days of film.\u00a0 Each different type of file had its own unique way of responding to the scene.\u00a0 Kodachrome film was great for reds while Ektachrome was perfect for blues.\u00a0 Fujichrome was prized for its treatment of greens and its high contrast.<\/p>\n
So what did the film camera see?\u00a0 The question is really, \u201cWhat did the film see?\u201d\u00a0 Was it a faithful documentation of reality?\u00a0 Not in the least.\u00a0 The same can be said for JPEG digital files.\u00a0 They are no more a faithful documentation of reality than film was.<\/p>\n
The fact is, RAW files are closer to what the camera saw than film or JPEG files ever were or will be.\u00a0 And, as one workshop participant put it to me, \u201cI don\u2019t like shooting in RAW because the photographs are so plain and uninteresting.\u201d\u00a0 There you go.\u00a0 What the camera sees, exactly what the camera sees, is often plain and uninteresting.<\/p>\n
So the physics of digital images captured in RAW format is that the images are the closest to what the camera sees.\u00a0 But from an artistic point of view, these images generally do not speak to us.\u00a0 These are documentation but that\u2019s not art; art is interpretation.<\/p>\n
Now, a RAW file is the perfect starting point from which to create art.\u00a0 It is neutral, unbiased and open to the artist to express what she saw, what she experienced that inspired her to set up the camera and compose the image, that led to the decisive moment that the shutter was pressed.<\/p>\n
In the days of film we relied on our selection of the type of film that would do the best job of rendering particular situations.\u00a0 In the digital era we have much more powerful tools that we ever had with film \u2013 Lightroom, Photoshop, Photomatix and all the wonderful software that we have access to that allows us to express our vision, our interpretation of reality.<\/p>\n
So, are my photographs what the camera saw?\u00a0 Not at all.\u00a0 They are what I saw.<\/p>\n