tweakin'

The comparison between these shots is an exploration into the question: to tweak or not to tweak?

before

after

This may not be a very good photograph to use as an example. Although I like this picture, I find it hard to like. That's part of why I used it last week - it felt like a risk to put up a picture I was unsure whether anyone else would see value in.

In truth these are two separate shots, but they can still be used for this comparison (I must have not saved the original for the "after" shot, though normally that is my habit). Still, the natural lighting in both shots was the same as they were taken only seconds apart and the camera settings were identical. What they illustrate is the difference manipulating cropping, brightness, contrast, & gamma correct can make after the shot has been taken.

Coming to photography after decades of being a writer seems to make this potential issue of "to tweak or not to tweak" a non-issue for me. Editing, after all, can be a wildly magical process where the initial nugget of inspiration gets polished & brought to a shine. That shine is inherent in the original, couldn't come from anywhere except the original. Editing a photo feels like an integral process very much the same as editing a piece of writing.

If you don't like this photo then the differences between the two shots here are barely noticeable! Yet to me the "after" shot brings the viewer in. Just this movement of coming in, allows the picture go from "a picture of a dead leaf" to an invitation to meet an entity (albeit that entity happens to be a dead leaf!). Once cropped for this "invitation" the brightness was enhanced & contrast increased. The invitation to meet this entity is enhanced by allowing more detail to be delineated.

This is a subtle perspective, a picture of something v an invitation to meet someone, and it is likely that such subtleties exist merely in the eye of the beholder. Which, moving from the issue of to tweak or not to tweak, expands this exercise to the value of art regardless of editing!

Mastering the masters is a delicious exercise for our growth. To play with mimicking the work of others can be a fantastic way to try things for ourselves and extend & enlarge our awareness. More than editing, tweaking, or any academic knowledge, expanding awareness is what art, making it and viewing it, can do. To tweak or not to tweak... lay in the eye of the beholder. Art is a prayer that the eye of the beholder is ever maturing by risk of failure to find vision & voice.