What Do Cameras Really Do, Anyway?
December 3rd, 2009 Rob Sheppard
I find it curious that so many students feel they have to “confess” to doing perfectly normal “darkroom” work in the computer. So you added contrast and saturation to the image file. Often a photograph needs something like that to correctly interpret a scene.
I think this comes from a misinterpretation of what cameras really do and because people have gotten afraid of being accused of “Photoshopping” their photos. What the camera does not do is create an arbitrarily objective view of the world. The camera creates a very biased look at the world based on the limitations of the sensor, image processing done inside the camera (which is done even with RAW), and very subjective decisions by engineers and designers of the camera. Every camera is a compromise in terms of image capture because it must do a good job with all sorts of photographers, plus sensors have some issues with tonalities and colors, and camera designers know this. It is impossible to create a camera that could capture every scene of every photographer’s vision objectively because conditions are so varied.
All photography is interpretation. Nothing else is actually possible because you cannot put the real world into a picture. You can only capture a representation of it that is defined and limited by what a camera can actually do in capturing a scene. The great LIFE photographer, Andreas Feininger, talked about this many years ago in his photography books published during the 1960s and 1970s. He noted that a photograph is rarely the same size as the real world scene, it has only two dimensions to represent a three-dimensional world, it is limited to one vantage point that cannot be shifted, it includes none of the subjective things that we always react to when we are in the real world such as heat, cold, smells, sounds, and so forth (these actually do influence what we see), and more so that any photograph is always an interpretation of the world.
In fact, he went further and said that an unadjusted photograph is very often any inaccurate interpretation of the world (he called it a lie) because many of its elements are undefined in relationship to this interpretation. I believe this is important if as photographers we are to get images that truthfully and accurately interpret the world for our audiences. We have a responsibility as a photographer to be sure that the image appropriately interprets the world so that our audiences better see and understand our world.
I once had somebody tell me that they didn’t worry about this concerning nature photography because nature is perfect so all they had to do is take a picture of it. It may be true that nature can be perfect, but a photograph of nature is not the same as nature. A photograph of nature can be very imperfect and can even lead us astray from what is really important in the scene. Often we must make some corrections to the original photo as interpreted by the camera so that it more accurately reflects an appropriate interpretation of the scene.
