Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: Three examples

Monday, March 10, 2025

Three examples

Here's 3 views of the same place, which happens to be just upstream of Elbow Falls. The first was taken late April 2023 during the late afternoon. The other two were taken a few minutes apart late Feb 2025, during a late morning ramble with Sean.

Scroll down and take a look at them. You've seen the first one before, here, but that's ok, it's worth another look.

You can easily see that the point of view is slightly different, but it's the same pool of water. The photographers of you will have noticed there are two somewhat different shutter speeds, and one drastically different one. You can tell by the texture of the water. #1 is the longest, probably about 2 minutes, 2 is the shortest at 1/800 which isn't quite fast enough to freeze splashing water, and 3 is 1/25 which gives the water a bit of a flowing texture. I find that about 1/15 or so, depending on lighting and water flow, gives flowing water a wonderful texture.

As an aside, picking the shutter speed for water can be difficult, depending on exactly what sort of image you're trying to present and what exactly the water and light is doing. This is one of the best examples of our brain seeing something very differently than what the camera sees.

But where I'm going with this is that I think of these images quite differently. The first is clearly a long exposure photography done on film. There was minimal editing to the image, beyond the choice of shutter time. It isn't what our eyes would see, but there's an air of reality to a slightly unreal looking image. I think it's a beautiful example of a photograph as art. In addition to the exposure time, I looked at the scene quite a bit before choosing where to put the camera, and then it took a while to get the focus where I wanted it.

The second is a digital image. I don't know what editing happens as the light hits the sensor, and the camera computer processes it, and my home computer converts the RAW image to a JPEG, with of course, the modest amount of editing done in Lightroom. A cell phone camera would probably produce an image similar to this one, but the water would almost certainly be frozen, and the image would be brighter. The computer would have done a lot of processing to "improve" the image.

Which leads to the third, which I think is digital art. It doesn't look quite real, so I don't think of it as a photograph, or particularly a digital image. It almost looks more like a painting where the artist put a lot of effort into rock detail. Beyond the choice of shutter speed, there was a lot of editing in Lightroom, pushing it beyond what I think of as normal photographic processing. I'm not sure I'd call it "over baked", since it doesn't really have that look, but if someone were to say so I wouldn't argue much.

There was less than 2 minutes between the second two photos, and there was another, different, photo in between. I am not saying that the longer I take with an image the better it is. Some of my best images are a few seconds from seeing the scene, and clicking the shutter. Much of the time I don't have to putz around with the manual settings. I've done this a lot, and can get pretty close by guess and by golly. And when I'm off a bit, I'm familiar enough with the camera I can tweak the settings in a few seconds. I find during events I'm more likely to lose photos from missed focus than screwed up exposure settings.

I've been thinking a lot about images and the differences between a film photograph, a digital photograph, and digital art. Then layer on top of that the difference between seeing an image on a computer screen, in a book, or printed to hang on a wall. None of these have been printed.

Which, as an aside, and maybe some of my computer buddies can answer this. I get that images were displayed on television starting in the late 40's. But when was the first image displayed on a computer screen, assembled from zeros and ones, that actually looked like a good photograph?

I happen to like the first image best. After all, it was image of the year for 2023. but I get where other people will feel differently. Feel free to tell me in the comments which you like, and why. I'm not saying that one is better than the other. It all depends on what the creator's artistic vision is.

Doing things old school, with a manual film camera, developing the film, and printing it via an enlarger takes much more time and is much less conducive to sharing with other people. It's hard to say how many people have seen any particular image on my blog. Some of the images I've sold to clients, which they have then displayed in their social media might have got more traction, but I've no way of knowing. It's entirely possible the print hanging on the wall at cSpace for a month was seen by more people than any other image I've produced in any medium.

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