“just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”
I can only listen to adverts in the TV or radio for a short while, before I have to either mute them, or turn them down. Deliberately processed to appear louder, and to grab our attention, they do in a way that is like being taken hostage. You cannot escape the distraction, and once caught, you get fatigued very quickly because sustained listening when it’s forced upon the listener has the limbic system working overtime.
There are images out there that could almost be tv/radio adverts. They are visually loud. Exaggerated foregrounds, stretched mountains, extreme contrast everywhere, and strong colour everywhere. And they assault our visual system in a heartbeat of us viewing them.
To the less experienced photographer, these are impressive images. To the more experienced, they are tiresome, perhaps bordering on clumsy work to look at, because everything is on show and there is no room left at all for wonder.
In a way, this is a rite of passage for all of us. I remember being impressed by high contrast. I also remember being swooned by high colour. And I also remember thinking if I managed to get both in one shot then I had a successful image.
I also remember reading Michael Reichman’s point of view that this is the territory of the inexperienced. Of someone who has not learned to ‘see’ yet and disagreeing with him to my very core. Reichman had also said in his article from over twenty years ago that as we get better at ‘seeing’ our appreciation of contrast and colour becomes more nuanced. At the time, I could not imagine what he was talking about because for me, colour and contrasts were everything.
In my own case, he was right. As time has marched on, I have found that using strong contrast globally is tiresome to my eye. I found I was now looking for more nuanced depth, and the way to do that, is to use high contrast selectively. My eye finds it much easier to stay with an image if it is less ‘globally’ attention seeking. If there are quieter passages and softer tones, my central nervous system isn’t forced into some kind of heightened state of awareness for the entirety of the viewing. Calm areas with intense areas mixed in allows my eye to have passages where it can relax. There is room for wonder.
Nuance takes time to learn. Because as photographers we have to learn to ‘see’.
No one escapes.
We have spent a lifetime trusting our visual coretex to help us navigate our world, and its job has been to look for the highest payoff for the least amount of effort. Paying attention to the small textural details of our world has never been a priority of our visual coretex. It’s goal is survival. Rather than paying attention to the things we need to learn to ‘see’ as photographers, it is more concerned with allowing us to navigate our world without danger. So for most of our waking life we have been filtering the less critical aspects of our world out.
Being a photographer is all about un-filtering. Of seeing the things our visual system has chosen to ignore. Evolutionary pay-offs - that which is not critical to our survival and has been removed, now needs to be instated. Added back in.
These days when I am editing my images, I rarely go to any global solution at the beginning of the session. Global edits are done often at the end, once all the tonal relationships of the image are in place, but perhaps needing a global adjustment for calibration purposes. No, global adjustments are not my friend, and if using a RAW editor, I seldom try to get the image to look ‘punchy’ before I open it in Photoshop. To do that is like trying to reach the finishing line before one has started.
Leave the subtle and nuanced contrasts alone. Leave the image looking deliberately flat and unfinished. Localised edits are where to put in the depth, selectively, and with greater appreciation for giving the viewer some quiet passages within the image for some space to breathe.
Regardless of my advice, I think we all have to go through the ‘big wow’ image phase for a while. We have to learn what doesn’t work, what fatigues our eyes, before we move on to looking for nuance and subtlety.