technically correct

Focus, exposure, even composition aren’t enough.

Our photographer was recently examining a couple of 35mm contact sheets from his latest rolls of film.  This is an archaic procedure that, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t dinosaurs, we’ll describe briefly.  Common film cameras produced reversed images (black-for-white, and vice versa) on a plastic scroll that was sort of 35mm wide and a yard long, 36 images for each roll.  This was cut up into strips and placed on a sheet of photographic paper to give a contact sheet, a set of correct (white-for-white) images, which were then examined with a magnifying glass to see which were worth printing on a larger format.

(This review of all images is perhaps the only part of the photographic process that technology has made more difficult, as we’ve noted: looking at a few dozen images at a time is easier than paging through the hundreds coming from your digital camera in a busy afternoon.)

Our photographer was struck by a couple of things.  First, the pictures were far from perfect technically.  They were taken indoors under existing light, and the film did not always record shadows and highlights perfectly.  Most smartphones would do better, automatically switching to high-dynamic-range mode and merging several exposures if necessary.  And the manual focus was not always spot-on, sometimes softening faces or other objects; the slow shutter speed and narrow depth of field also contributed.  That is, the pictures were not always perfect scientific records of the scenes he photographed.

But that wasn’t important.  His friends, neighbors and colleagues were recorded quite well enough.  Indeed, adding more sharp detail in unnecessary areas would often have been only distracting; in a couple of shots he thought the isolation of heads against a dark background was particularly effective.  He is not quite ready to claim that he is a master of using the imperfections of his medium as tools of expression, as a true artist is, but at least he can accommodate them and generally work around them.

Second, none of these were selfies.  That is, none showed people grinning directly at the camera so as to record only their presence at a particular time and place, and little more.  Now, selfies as such have their place, and are certainly a human product; but we concur in our opinion that there are far too many of them, and we’ll avoid them if possible.  Instead, our photographer used a particularly unobtrusive camera to show people not-posing.  If he has a particular talent in picture-taking, he thinks it lies in showing people as they normally appear.  His ambition is to catch the image that everyone would agree, “that’s her!”, and beyond that to show people interacting with other people.  Sometimes he thinks he almost succeeds.

Of course if his capture is so murky that nothing can be made out, he fails from the outset.  But a usable image is just the starting point.