I have taken over 5,600 photos of Sheldon, my favorite model. As I have written before, shooting the same person over and over forces me to be creative. She is very pretty, and it’s easy to just delight in capturing that prettiness or beauty, but I want to push myself, imaginatively, to present that beauty in some striking, different way. Often this has to do with light and shadow. (“Photography” means “light-writing,” and you need darkness or shadow for the light to stand out.) The next time I shoot her, I hope that we will work with an optical spotlight and “gobos,” or go-betweens, that is, things that introduce shape into the shadows. We have done so before, so I have ask myself, What can I do that is not just more of the same?
I am intrigued by liminality, images that are at the boundary of intelligibility. This isn’t just accidental blur, or something out-of-focus -that’s easy. So my Spark lens, which blurs everything except where I put the focus, is very useful, as are 1) having the model move deliberately during a longer exposure; 2) having the model stand still for 5 seconds of a 10-second exposure, then leaving the frame; 3) reducing contrast as much as possible (so light and dark aren’t that different); and 4) adding “grain” in Lightroom, so that larger shapes rather than surface and detail become visually engaging.
And then, of course, there are filters, which can do amazing things with images. It’s easy to despise these as artificial, but the test is the result: does the image engage the viewer in some way? (What does engage mean? Looking at an image for more than a couple of seconds, and remembering it long after you’ve seen it. Or having an image move you in some way, and you don’t know why.) From the beginning, photography has involved manipulation of images. The famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams used to replace the sky in one image with that from another. Artificial Intelligence can create some beautiful images, but more often there is a kind of dull, homogenized aesthetic. With texts, AI isn’t designed to produce truth, but merely plausibility, as people who have dug down into its answers have found, when researching subjects they know well. Similarly, AI in art produces what might seem aesthetically pleasing to some people — perhaps most people — but there’s something missing. It’s hard to say what, exactly, but AI’s visual milkshake doesn’t measure up. The post-processing of an image should come from the photographer, as he or she sees something in particular that makes the image for him or her. It is the image that calls for a particular treatment, and that’s part of the art of photography.
It’s hard to learn that, with images, less is sometimes more. I took 446 shots. Here are 17.
