Bill Exley Photography

to Photoshop or not to…

I remember the first time someone asked me whether I had enhanced one of my photographs. Without hesitation I answered, “What you see is what I saw”. Except in the fun, jovial moments of morphing images, my work involves recreating what I saw, the moment I chose to take the picture.

I’ve been reading a book on Light and Exposure and reading through the details helped me understand the idea of enhancing images. In a nutshell, technology cannot capture what the eye sees, those fine subtleties that only the human eye can convey. I don’t expect technology can ever recreate the wonders of our biological systems – scientists will continue to try – and believe there are some things we’ll never be able to recreate. The number of sensors in the human eye far outnumber those the best digital camera or slow-speed film can hold. Thank goodness though for that same technology that can give people sight.

At the end of my first photography class, my teacher invited Ansel Adam’s curator to show off some of that work. He flipped over Moonrise over Hernandez and pointed to at least 10 areas where the original image was altered (dodged and burned) during the development process. Since the dawn of photography, the development process has involved some level of human intervention, some radical, some subtle, but all in the pursuit of capturing some level of photographic emotion.

Enjoy those moments when an image speaks to you, independent of whether the image was altered or not. Appreciate how those images trigger feelings.

Tags: ansel adams, enhancing, eyesight, photoshop