Creating Images

Creating Images

by William Lulow

These days it is much easier to “create” a photograph than it was with film. I’m not talking about “taking” a picture. It’s more about “making” an image. 

Ansel Adams, the famous American landscape photographer, often “saw” images that didn’t actually exist yet. He would make several exposures of the same scene and then work with them in the darkroom to bring out things that were there but that the camera hadn’t really recorded the way Adams eventually saw them. They were there, but not actually shown on a paper print. So, he worked with his prints and negatives especially to bring out what he knew was inherently there but hadn’t been revealed. And, it took a bit of work. With a piece of cotton soaked with developer, he could turn a grey sky black and bring out or hide details. With a special darkroom tool called a dodging stick, he could lighten parts of an image while the rest of the picture remained dark. Or with a piece of cardboard with a special hole cut in it, he could “burn in” parts of the photograph to make them darker. This can be achieved today with the help of masks in Photoshop. It would often take him weeks to work on a single image to make it resemble more of what he saw with his mind’s eye. This extra work turned the picture into a photographic masterpiece. It’s the reason that he is still revered for what he created. 

We do the same things with digital images today. Here’s a scene In Zermatt, Switzerland I “saw” but knew it would take work to bring out what I envisioned. First, the original the way the camera saw it:

What I saw here was the trees with light coming in from behind that lit up the tops, but I knew that the camera itself didn’t have the tools to do what I wanted. I would have to wait until I could work on it with my computer. I was walking down a street and just happened to see this. I knew that the backlighting would be spectacular. I also knew it would take some time to make the scene look like what I had in mind. This was it:

I knew that with some increase in contrast and the addition of some VIBRANCE in Photoshop, I could coax a really interesting image from what my camera recorded. 

Another example is the use of artificial light to create images that might not otherwise occur in nature:

Here, just the knowledge of studio lighting helped solve a problem that occurred when you just aimed a camera at these bulbs. Everything was white except the bases. The problem was how to show the glass as well as the filaments! The solution was to light them with a CROSS LIGHT which lights the sides but not the middle of a person or thing. All of a sudden the filaments stood out against the darker part of a special gradient background and the sides of the glass also were shown. This was lit with just two softboxes set up in the cross-light position. 

Here’s an example of a view I saw. It had a bit of blue in the sky but was generally cloudy. I thought there was enough blue to play with so I made the exposure, then worked on it in post. 

Sometimes, you simply need to make adjustments to exposure and other filters that can enhance your image:

It has become a very usual step in making photographs as good as they can be, to make adjustments of various kinds in the post-production phase of the process. With film, it was much more difficult to make these kinds of changes. With my vast experience shooting film, I learned to make various changes and edits in the camera itself. Black & White didn’t present much of a problem because most of us processed our own film and made our own prints, as Mr. Adams did. So, we could work on our images the way he did. Color photography presented its own challenges and we often had to be more creative when it came to solving those problems. 

Here is a standard double exposure made with my old flat-bed view camera and sheet film:

A client wanted a shot of the building that housed his corporate offices, but with a Christmas-ish kind of look to it. So, I made one exposure before the sun went down to show the buildings and another after dark to show the lights and the streaming cars’ lights. A double exposure on the same piece of film made just hours apart did the trick. 

Here’s another digital “trick.” How can you make an image when the level of light is so low that with normal exposure techniques, you wouldn’t see anything at all. Photographs are “light pictures.” So, you need light! Today’s digital camera manufacturers have been able to make sensors for recording light waves that are much more sensitive to them than film ever was. Here is an image made with an ISO (sensitivity setting) of 8000! Remember, “normal” is ISO 100:

Or this one made with ISO of 2500:

Today, with digital tools, we can create images that we might not have been able to just a few years ago. We are able to use light much more creatively than ever before.