Behind The Scenes: Water, Land, and Sky
My ‘Behind The Scenes’ series allows viewers to learn more about what went into the making of an image. When viewing a photo, you might well be wondering what the whole area looked like, rather than just what fit into the confines of the framed artwork. You might also be wondering 'is that what it really looked like?’, since part of any artwork incorporates the artist’s interpretation into it. In this post I intend to answer some of those questions for my image entitled ‘Water, Land, and Sky’ from my ‘The Sea’ portfolio.
Water, Land, and Sky © Howard Grill
First, let’s address the ‘elephant in the room’. Do I use Photoshop on my images? The answer, without apology, is yes - and so does just about every serious photographer or artist. And you pretty much want them to because, as an artist, you want them to convey not only what they see, but also how it makes them feel.
So along those lines, here is how the above scene actually appeared on the LCD of my camera at the the time I took the picture.
Of course, other than actually being there at the time there really isn’t a way to display ‘exactly’ what it looked like. That’s because this photo of the back of my camera was taken with my cell phone, and the phone itself interprets and processes the image internally in order to display an image. As you likely know, a digital image is simply a string of data taken off a sensor with red, green, and blue filters over it and, to display that data as a photo, it must be reconstructed. During that reconstruction, there are internal settings related to the amount of contrast, saturation, and other variables that are added by the phone’s camera. The true ‘RAW’ data coming off the sensor looks nothing like the scene unless these enhancements are added.
Actually, even if you were standing right next to me, your perception of the scene is likely to be somewhat different than mine, though now we are getting into existential issues :)
My finished, processed photo is my interpretation of not only what the scene looked like, but also what it felt like to be there. At the time, I took a whole series of photos to try to get the waves and birds in different positions and picked the most pleasing one to my eye. That is why the waves and birds on the back of the camera don’t exactly match up with the finished photo. If you blinked, those things changed!
If this interests you, you might enjoy an article I wrote some time ago called ‘Photography And Truth’.
I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look!
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