Edit

Many of you will have seen this picture before. I took it a couple of days ago, and it, or one very like it, is on my Facebook page or on one or two other places online. People have told me it makes St. Clair look quite exotic, fair enough, because it is, if you don't live there, and several have asked if I have modified it.

Well, yes, of course I have modified it. I modified it the moment I pressed the shutter button, but that's not the point. There's a perception out there that edited photos are kind of cheating; that the "best" pictures are the natural ones, unaltered from the images that pop out of the camera.

Well... let's think about that for a bit.

I stand on a cold Spring evening, just after dusk. What I am in the midst of is a multi sensory, 3-D experience, which, for reasons you'd probably best ask my counselor about, I want to share. So I get out my camera which is about as capable a digital camera as you can buy without taking out a mortgage, but it is nowhere near as capable as the human eye. No camera on the planet is as capable as the human eye, so no camera can record what you see with absolute accuracy.  Then, I put a wide angle lens on the front of and immediately change the perspective of what is before me. I make a few settings, each of which similarly alters the way the scene is going to be recorded. Then I press the button and the shutter opens and lets the light in to where it can be recorded. Inside my camera there is a piece of plastic -the sensor - about the size of a postage stamp. It is covered with 24.4 million separate, tiny, light sensitive pieces of silicon. None of these little tiny doohickeys can register colour - all they can do is record whether or not a photon of light has hit them, and send a corresponding "yes" or "no" to a tiny computer hidden somewhere inside the camera.

So, the experience of standing in the wind on a cold beach in the semi dark with the roar of waves and the clouds billowing, and rain approaching from the horizon and the air filled with salt gets translated into a string of 24.4 million "yes"s and "no"s. In about 1/10 of a second the computer has, by way of an ingeniously written piece of software, translated that information into a picture, and, by interpreting their patterns, inferred the presence of colour.

Later, I download the file of "yes"s and "no"s, in the form of something called a RAW file, onto my computer and use an editing program to produce a picture out of it. My complete body experience of the living, moving world gets translated, then into a 2 dimensional image on my screen: a couple of feet across if I'm using my computer, or a couple of inches if I'm using my phone.

If I'd wanted to, I could have let my camera perform this translation for me, but the result might have been disappointing. The data captured by the camera gets interpreted one way or another - either by me, or by the camera’s software. The camera is clever, but it’s not intelligent and does its work by approximating what it thinks most people want to see most of the time. It goes for averages. I prefer to do it myself.

The RAW file would have produced a picture that, unedited, would have looked like this:

There are some obvious faults with this picture: little spots in the sky which show where, despite having had it cleaned last week, minuscule specks of dust are resting on the sensor; the horizon has an unfortunate slope to it; it looks too flat and dull to be an accurate representation of the experience I wanted to share. So, I use the editing program to try and make it more accurately convey something of what was before me on the beach.

On the day, I took 5 different versions of this picture. I have made several different edits. Here are some of them:

I quite like this version..

... and I like this. Monochrome forces my attention on to shape and texture.

So which of them is best? Which is the most accurate? Well....actually... none of them is best. None is more "accurate" than the others. All contain information which is actually there, and what shifts between them is the balance of that information. Each, in their own ways convey something of that moment on the beach.

Photography is a lot like our ordinary, human process of perception. We are never present to the Universe except through our five sense, and these are all, in their own ways, limited. Information comes to our brains through the senses and we then interpret it, using our own personal set of filters that depends for its existence on our biology, our personal experience, our present mood, our expectations, and a thousand things beside. It's the same for all of us, though because of this, perceptions are never the same for all of us - not of anything. We know ourselves to be immature and lacking in depth if we imagine that our own unique and idiosyncratic perspective is the "real" one, and that, if others' perceptions differ from it, they are somehow lacking.

Photography has always, from its 19th Century beginnings, been a two stage process: capture and processing.  The greatest landscape photographer ever to have lived, Ansel Adams, is reported to have said he spent an hour in the darkroom for every hour he spent in the field. So did I modify the picture? Of course I did. And the better I get as a photographer, the more time I spend  thinking about how I am going to process what my camera captures, and why.

A lot like life, really. Exactly like life, really.