When I look at my collection of images in Lightroom, my first sensation is the same one I have looking around my office or my house, which is that I need to spend a dedicated day re-organizing and getting rid of clutter. (Not the least of which is to know better which images I’ve used here—it is possible that I’ve essentially written today’s column at least once before.)
The second thing I’m thinking about is whether there are neglected images that have potential for further work, whether through direct post-processing on the image itself or some form of collage or layering in Photoshop that combines one image with others. That thought tends to mitigate against the desire to declutter (in life as well as on my hard drive) because of the sudden feeling that maybe something that seems like junk could become treasure.
The third feeling I have on looking through the whole catalog is basically life-flashes-before-your-eyes: I see the last twenty years replayed as I scroll. (I also have a lot of scans of childhood photos, so sometimes more than twenty years.) One moment I see in particular is the moment where I turned the knob on my first DSLR to M for Manual after years of shooting on full automatic. I never looked back.
What I see in the catalog is a kind of child-like exploration not so much of the camera as of Lightroom and Photoshop, which up to that point I’d used only in the simplest of ways. I can see myself moving sliders back and forth, being surprised often at the outcome: darker! lighter! sharper! fuzzier! and most especially “whoa, colors changed!”.
What I mostly didn’t do, and still don’t do, is use the preset filters. So when I came across this image from a favorite set of shots in the woods where I was experimenting with medium-exposure shots where I moved the camera, I was kind of puzzled, and I still am. I know I didn’t use a Photoshop filter, but I did something that made it look like a drawing. I don’t have the pre-altered shot any more, just this:
It’s got a compositional problem that isn’t about the processing—that big tree is too centered. I can tell that one thing I did is switch it to black & white. I can guess at some of the rest of what got me there, but it intersects with the camera movement, which is what creates the blurry feeling. Otherwise it really looks like a charcoal sketch, rather attractively so.
But this underscores a point that a colleague of mine made to me years ago. You can fiddle around with a tool or a technique without really understanding what you’re doing. That turns out to be a bad idea only when you hit on a result that you really like, only to find out that you can’t do it again. That is sort of the case with this image. I’ve fiddled with some of the images in this set and I don’t really come up with anything quite like it. Perhaps I am too knowing now and the slider that matters is the slider I don’t touch.
On the other hand, thinking about it leads me to some interesting results that I not only can recreate, I can intellectually understand what I’m trying to do in the processing, so that the shot on the right is what I intended to make, and rather like the image that kicked this off, I feel like it’s a painterly or drawn outcome.
I keep waiting for a day where the conditions seem right to do the same sorts of shots again—there was a small amount of snow on the ground and a sky full of big clouds and periodic bright sunlight, which gave me a really variable experience of lightness and darkness in a dense wood that threaded between farm meadows. Who knows what I might make next time, when I know more about what I’m doing? But perhaps I will know too much, and the improvisational moves I made in the past will suddenly be too hard to make today.