“Reality” and the Camera
February 11th, 2009 Rob SheppardAn important learning for any new photographer is to recognize that what you see and what the camera sees are two different things. This means that you start to look for conditions that the camera “likes” — often new photographers think if they just buy a “better” camera, they can better capture the reality that they see. But cameras do not capture “reality” — they can only interpret it based on their limitations.
This is a common problem with flower photography, for example. A beautiful flower is in front of the photographer, so all he or she needs is a good camera and lens, right? Well, that flower is a work of art of its own, and unless you are just interested in snapshots for recordkeeping, just pointing the camera at the flower and photographing it will be disappointing. The flower is always better than its likeness in the photograph. The photograph of a flower is not the same as the flower — that is a very important thing to remember.
So to get a good flower photograph, we must approach the flower as an interesting subject for a photograph. The photograph is a separate entity than the flower. Anyone who looks at a photograph sees only what is represented by the photograph, so the craft of photography is absolutely critical — everything from light to composition to depth-of-field to focal length choice and so forth. It is important to interpret that flower in such a way that the image looks good as a photograph and does justice to the flower. It is impossible for a photograph to be anything other than an interpretation as real life is so much more than what can be held in a two-dimensional, stopped time photograph.
One area that I see a problem with a lot comes from when photographers see an interesting subject, but don’t see how the light is affecting the photograph. They end up trying to make the sensor and camera do things it cannot. One of the things any photographer must learn is how to see the world the way the camera does and not simply how we do. The camera cannot see the world the way we do. The biggest challenge is that the camera cannot always capture the range of colors and tones we see with our eyes.
This is especially true when a scene has high contrast between bright and dark areas. In many such situations, it is impossible to get good colors because, although you can see the colors okay in a contrasty situation, the camera cannot. A good exposure cannot show the whole range of colors and tones in the scene. Sometimes, as photographers, we have to recognize that certain photos are not possible and try a different angle, different light, etc.
