B&W underground

For the past few years I have been trying to shoot the perfect photograph. Everything in it’s place, no extraneous distractions, everything perfect. The harder I tried the more frustrated I got.

Some of you are probably going why does it have to be perfect in the camera? You can fix anything you don’t like in Photoshop. I was raised photographically as a newspaper photographer and that kind of image manipulation just goes against everything I was ever taught.

For my fine art B&W I use Photoshop to do my conversions, adjust contrast and density via a Curves layer, sharpen with USM and then print from. For news assignments, it is color and density corrections in Lightroom then out to whatever file format is needed.

Some where in the air between Tulsa and Ft. Wayne while doing my best sardine impression and reading Henri Cartier-Bresson it hit me. His photographs are great but they weren’t perfect in the way I was trying to achieve. I realized his photographs show real life and life isn’t perfect and what I needed to do was concentrate more on shooting real life and worry much less about perfect photographs.

Friday while I was importing the images from Thursday night’s band shoot into Lightroom I remembered this image and went looking for it.

From the time I saw this woman walk by in the bar I had imagined this shot, it was perfect. After I shot it, I knew it was perfect, I even chimped, something I rarely do and there it was on the camera LCD, perfection. When I found it in Lightroom I was crushed, it wasn’t the perfect image I had imagined. There was this ugly pool table with an obnoxious white cue ball in the background. My dream of the perfect photograph went up in smoke before my eyes.

Then my brain went, airplane, sardine, Bresson, aha moment.

I opened the image in Photoshop, did my normal B&W conversion, curves tweak and took a second look at the image with a different set of eyes. I had done better than perfect, I had captured a slice of life, better than that I had captured a glimpse of who this person is.

The ugly pool table and obnoxious cue ball suddenly became integral parts of the photograph, they helped set the stage. The B&W version leads you to the t-shirt first, then the tattoos and finally the piercings, the pool table in the background helps tie it all together. A photographer on a forum where I posted this image suggested it would be better without the scarf. To me that is just another clue to who she is, what she is like.

Now I am spending less time worrying about perfect photographs and more time working on getting up the nerve to approach people I don’t know and asking if I can shoot them.

cort

tonight’s music, Sling Blade and Lyle Lovett