It might be hard to figure that the work above even is a photograph. I think it looks more like a painting, but that’s intentional. I wanted to take a photograph and transform it into something very different, and this is one of the results of that effort.
But let’s begin at the beginning.
A long time ago, a common way to take a photograph was to make a tiny pinhole and put that in front of a photosensitive surface. An interesting property of pinholes is that they act like a lens. They don’t produce a terribly sharp image, but they very definitely produce an image. Here is a conventional pinhole camera image of South Prairie Creek, near my home.
Notice that it’s not really sharp like most of my photographs; a pinhole camera is not a sharp camera. It makes an image, but the same laws of physics that allow a pinhole to act like a lens dictate that it won’t be a high-quality lens.
From a technical point of view, a pinhole must be balanced between two opposite forces. On the one hand, the smaller the lens, the more tightly it brings the light together into an image, like a lens. On the other hand, the smaller the lens, the more it will scatter the light going through it.
To make a proper pinhole lens, you must balance these two things: make it small enough to create an image, but not so small that the image is completely smeared by scattering (because of diffraction).
I did some testing, and the image of the creek above is pretty much at that balance point. I was also careful to make the size of the image small enough to hide the worst of the softening.
(The creek image is actually a panorama made of three images. I swung the camera from right to left to take each image in the sequence, and assembled the panorama in Capture One software.)
Let’s get back to the photo that looks like a painting. The first important thing to know about it is that I did a bad job of setting the exposure. I was driving down Route 162 between Buckley and South Prairie, and the sun broke through the smoke from the fires we have everywhere right now. It created a madness of light, a huge glare lighting hills and trees and houses from the back. I turned into someone’s driveway, got the camera, set an exposure with more hope than skill, and took a shot, then drove away. I was nervous about being in someone’s driveway; I didn’t want to spend 10 minutes there trying different settings. And the smoke and clouds were moving, and the effect didn’t last but a moment anyway.
I did not have much hope for a good photo. This is what I wound up with, straight out of the camera:
It already looks like a painting—perhaps something by Andrew Wyeth that has gone terribly wrong? But I knew some things about the picture because I work a lot with cameras:
The image looks overexposed, but I used my ‘good’ 35mm camera, even though I knew the image wouldn’t be sharp. I’m not going to buy a cheap camera for pinhole photography just to have it; I was happy to use my good camera even if it meant that I’d only be using 5% of its capabilities.
One of those capabilities is good dynamic range: the camera can record brights and darks that won’t show up in a standard print of the photo; I can recover highlights or dig into the darks to bring them up. In this case, I brought down the highlights, and tried the image in black and white.
I like the result a lot, because it looks really old-timey. This could be a town in the dust bowl in the 1930s, for example. But I immediately realized that the best result overall would have to retain the color.
The color in the original was OK, but…I have tools and tricks I can use from my experience to try new directions. In this case, I applied a film simulation that was pretty sophisticated: I applied a Kodachrome style, one with halation (blooming of the bright areas with a soft edge; it can happen to real film during development, and sometimes photographers will do it on purpose to get the look). I decided to try the halation for its effect, and I also brought down the highlights re reveal more details.
The result is the ethereal image at the top of this post. It’s not sharp; it’s heavily manipulated, and I really like it. It probably says more about the value of creative thinking that about the scene, but I think all aspects of a photo, and the technical and creative art one applies to it, are all valid. I am not only making a record when I take a photograph; I am grabbing a piece of reality and trying to end up with something that has some oomph - maybe a prefect photo; maybe something artful; maybe something magical or technically challenging. In this case, it was as much play as it was technique.
I think this may be as close as I can come to making a painting with a photograph.
There were several other experiments along the way; this one also turned out interesting, but it is more natural than my final choice. I think it’s worth including.
Is this photography? I this art? I don’t really care what labels go on it; it was creative, it was fun, it made me so very very happy to do it.