As I write this, late on Christmas night, I’d like to wish all a Merry Christmas (or sacred/secular holiday of your choice, depending on your religious beliefs or lack thereof).
On this Christmas, if I had the wherewithal to do so, I’d give a copy of noted photographer Michael Frye’s e-book, Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom, to every photographer who visits this site. Fortunately, since it costs less than the average information-thin, repetition-heavy, advertisement-laden photography magazine, you can easily pick up a copy here. I heartily recommend you do so.
In Light & Land, a 36-page PDF, Frye takes five of his photos from RAW file to finished image, providing step-by-step instructions as to how he created his final photograph entirely with Lightroom 3 (which is rapidly supplanting Photoshop as my primary tool as well). Among the highlights of this short e-book are a recommended workflow, a thorough explanation of LR3′s new and long-needed point-curve tool, a demonstration on how the standard Adobe “default” settings can make it difficult to judge your image, suggestions on sharpening landscape photographs, and black-and-white conversion procedures.
But what makes this book truly liberating is that Frye has the courage to break the Great Taboo of digital photography: he actually shows us his RAW files! In case you haven’t noticed, there is a certain prevalent mythology in digital photography that holds Photoshop to be the Great Evil that is corrupting the art. In many people’s minds, the worst thing you can be accused of is “photoshopping your images,” which is tantamount to fraud according to the self-proclaimed photographic purists. (This, despite the fact that everyone, purists included, uses tools such as Photoshop or Lightroom to some extent.) To believe the purists’ claims, real landscape photographers — like themselves, of course! — create great images straight out of the camera with no manipulation whatsoever, and it is only lesser talents — in other words, hacks like you and me — who need to resort to trickery in post-processing to manufacture a seemingly-good-looking but ultimately fraudulent final image out of capture-file dross.
Frye will have none of it. He openly shares Ansel Adams’s belief (as do I) that “the negative is the score, the print is the performance.” (Those who have seen straight, unmanipulated contact prints from Adams’s negatives have been known to remark that they looked nothing at all like his finished images.) In revealing his RAW files, Frye lets everyone in on the Dirty Little Secret of landscape photography: that, even in the hands of a master, RAW captures generally come across as flat and dull, and need considerable work in post-processing to make an image true to one’s original vision at the time of capture and, in Frye’s words, “squeeze every ounce of beauty, emotion, and inspiration out of your photographs.”
This is not just informative; as I said above, it’s liberating. How many of you out there have looked at your RAW captures, and bemoaned the fact that they looked nothing at all like the finished landscape images you have admired from others? True, you might have succeeded in improving them in Photoshop or Lightroom, but…doesn’t the code of the self-proclaimed photographic purists declare that such post-processing makes you a fraud, not a real photographer like they are, able to capture near-perfect images without manipulation?
There’s just one thing about the self-proclaimed photographic purists: they never show you their RAW captures. Frye does, proving that even a master photographer needs to use post-processing tools to create the image “performance” out of the RAW capture “score.” Look at Frye’s originals, and free yourselves from the dogma of the self-proclaimed photographic purists…then learn from his steps, and discover how to create images that match your personal vision out of the “raw” ore of your original files.
The picture included here doesn’t begin to do it justice, simply because you can’t really convey scale in an web-sized image; imagine a fall 250 feet high, with the water breaking into dozens of mini-trails over moss-covered rock, then dropping through an undercut onto a series of basalt “steps” somewhat resembling Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. As you look at the photo, also imagine a sense of the water constantly in motion on its multitude of passages, instead of being frozen in time by the camera’s shutter. I wish I could find a way to convey it; “breathtaking” doesn’t come close to an accurate description.
Meanwhile, on the way back to the road, the trail took me through a forest glade just as the sun illuminated the small tree at its center, and, afterward, through a lava-flow from an extinct volcano, with new growth emerging from the volcanic rocks and remains of older growth providing a sobering reminder of what is often the fate of living things trying to gain a toehold among the stones.
