Look See: Photo Jazz

“The more you look, the more you see.” That phrase has been going through my mind recently, and in two contexts: 1) describing cartoons, 2) photography. The meaning is obvious enough, yet bears investigation. Since I’ve already addressed the first activity, I want to concentrate on the second in this post.

Get the Shot

Consider this photograph:

There’s a tree in the foreground. Or rather, there’s a part of a tree, since we can’t see the whole (above ground portion of the) tree. In the background we see the blurred outlines of parts of some buildings. One of which, the Empire State Building, is quite famous. I don’t know exactly where I was standing when I took that photo – though I could probably return to within, say, 50 yards of the spot. I took it sometime after 7AM last Saturday (9 April 2011), and the photograph itself is time-stamped, though the stamp is not very accurate (as I had to set the timer at some point, and I did so manually).

So, the photograph represents real objects as they appeared at a certain time and place. But that scene, as such, has no existence other than in the images I, or someone else, constructs from data taken out of the camera. In saying this I’m not setting the stage for some deep metaphysical argument about appearance and reality, though one could certainly go in that direction. I’m simply laying out the practical facts of photography.

I took a number of shots while I was standing more or less in the same location. I didn’t think about any one of them for more than a few seconds.

Let’s look at some numbers: Between 7:01:34 AM and 7:05:33 AM I took 16 shots. That’s 16239 shots in 239 seconds, or one shot every 15 seconds. Of course I didn’t take the shots at regular intervals, and I’m sure I was walking during that time. In fact, I was walking rapidly toward the bank of the Hudson so that I could get some shots of the cruise ship that had just passed in front of my location. Which meant that I was in conflict between the need to get to the river walk and the desire to take photos along the way. The time pressure was very much like that of jazz improvisation, and so with a similar mental process: lots of quick decisions made on an intuitive basis.

No time for deliberation, just get the shot. And the next one. And the next.

I was not lingering on each scene, soaking it in, groking it, to borrow a word from the Heinlein 60s. One can do that while strolling along, looking for the opportunity for another set of shots – it’s one of the pleasures of photography. But that’s not what you do when you’ve switched into ‘get the shot’ mode.

Here’s the shot I took six seconds after the shot above:

Notice the focus. That’s deliberate. And this one, eleven seconds after that:

Six seconds and eleven seconds are long intervals in the world of jazz improvisation, but when you’re on the street, moving around, and the world’s moving around you (‘Get out of the way!’) they’re not so long.

What Do We Have Here?

The fact is, you don’t know what shots you’ve taken until you get them out of the camera. In the old days that meant a nasty chemical process that took awhile. These days, with digital photography, it means downloading to your computer and taking a look, which is much easier.

Yes, despite the fact that I was taking a shot every few seconds, I took those shots with deliberation. I had my eyes open, I knew what I was seeing.

As I said, you don’t know what you’ve shot until you get it out of the camera. For one thing, there’s color. For reasons that I’ve explained at some length, you can’t take a photograph whose colors exactly reproduce what your eye saw at the time you took the shot. The photographer has to choose how to realize the color information recorded by the camera. As the visual sensitive to color, that choice is critical. I dare say color choice is one aspect of a photographer’s signature.

Then there’s focus. I deliberately play around with where I focus the shot. In the first photo I focused on the tree while I focused on the Empire State building in the second and, for all practical purposes, in the third as well. As a result of those choices the tree is in sharp focus in the first photo, as intended, while the Empire State Building is blurred. That’s not so much a matter of deliberate intent as a side-effect of focusing on the tree.

The second two are a bit different on this count. I knew, of course, that by focusing on the buildings in the background the tree(s) in the foreground would be blurred. But I didn’t know how much and I didn’t know whether or not I’d like the effect. I think the third photograph works better than the second. In fact, I only realized the second one so I could use it in this post.

And that brings us to the third and all-important matter: composition. How things lay within the frame. The frame puts an arbitrary boundary into the world, a boundary that has nothing to do with how things are. Such frames don’t even exist in ordinary vision. To be sure, our visual field is bounded, framed in a way. But the boundary isn’t rectilinear, nor is it sharp. Most importantly, our eyes are constantly flitting around, and we can move our head as well. So we can build-up a pretty full and effective display of the visual world in our mind’s eye.

The frame is something that’s imposed by the process of making a picture. You can, of course, frame the image in your camera. But when you’re shooting rapidly that not always easy to do. Even when you frame with considered intent, and the shot comes out as you’d intended, you may reconsider the shot upon viewing it on your monitor, or a print. And you may decide to crop the photo so as to reframe the image – you may even have had that in mind when you originally took the shot, shooting an image with a two by three form factor knowing you’re probably going to crop it to three by four, for example.

That framed image, its composition, that’s a gestalt that doesn’t exist out there in the world. It’s the single most important thing about the photograph. It’s something the photographer brings to the world.

Seeing the World Through Photographs

But make no mistake, it’s the world that’s visible in the photograph, not the photographer’s mind. The photograph is a negotiation between the photographer and the world. And if you’re thinking that the photographer’s the only party that’s negotiating, you’re mistaken. Well, maybe not. I suppose there’s a sense in which the world lays there passively while the photographer takes the shot.

But if that’s what you think, then you’ll never be a good photographer.

Photography is an act of love. Through it you discover the world and enter into a deeper relationship with it. The photographs are but a trace of that changing relationship. You leave them behind as you once again step out into the world, look around, and see what you’ve not see before. Look in new ways.

With or without camera in hand.