Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

How Your Eye Differs from Your Camera

In Chapter 2, I detailed how scientific studies prove that the eye sees only a small area sharply and that it jumps around a scene, seeking the important parts and filling in the rest rather casually. That scientific underpinning leads to my definition of good composition as the artist’s method of “de-randomizing the eye’s motion” through an image.

Let’s delve deeper into the consequences of the eye seeing only small areas sharply while jumping around a scene. As the eye looks at a bright area, the pupil tends to close down quickly in order to allow you to see it without being blown away by the brightness. Then the brain turns down the brightness still more so that it doesn’t overwhelm you. When you glance at a dark area, your pupil dilates—or opens up—to allow you to see into that dark hole. Again, your brain helps open up that dark area so you can see it better. In other words, you look at any scene through multiple apertures.

But when you set the aperture for your camera, you expose the entire scene at one preset aperture. That’s quite different from the way your eyes see. So don’t be fooled. Your eyes do not see the scene the same way that a camera sees it. In fact, your eyes can and will fool you. Recognizing the differences can help, but the fact is that much experience is necessary to overcome them. Even then, there will be times that you’ll be fooled. That’s why it’s important to use a light meter with traditional photography or study the histogram with digital photography—the “truth tellers”—to give you factual data about the true light levels and relationships of light within a scene. Sometimes the information the meter or histogram gives you will be astonishing, telling you that something is not nearly as bright as you think it is, or that it’s much brighter than you’d thought. Knowing the true brightness level of various objects will also give you important clues about the problems you may face later in printing the image to your satisfaction.

Alternative Approaches

The approach detailed above of envisioning the final print while standing behind the camera, and creating a strategy for achieving it, is known as “previsualization”. I stated above that this is how art is done. But it turns out that there are variations and other approaches.

A different form of previsualization is regularly used in street photography. You may find a location that looks good to you, so you set up your camera, waiting for some unexpected action to take place in that setting. In essence, you’ve chosen a stage setting and you’re waiting for the actors to show up, but you don’t know who they are or what they’ll be doing when they arrive. André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, and Craig Richards often rely upon this form of previsualized surprise.

Previsualization can be augmented by postvisualization. Discovery by postvisualization (or “postrationalization” as some have dubbed it) can take two forms. First is the discovery of a previously unseen quality in a print, one that makes its presence known only after the print is seen. A prime example is Paul Caponigro’s study of an apple, titled “New York, 1963”. Originally intended to be a photographic tone poem of the texture of a common apple, Caponigro saw in his first prints a pattern of white dots on the apple’s skin—and ambient light reflected off the skin—that reminded him of astronomical photographs. Seeing the unexpected quality, Caponigro printed the image darker and more contrasty to pursue his new vision more effectively. The final print truly evokes a feeling of intergalactic space. Only careful scrutiny reveals the apple as the basis of this remarkable print.

Finding an unexpected quality in a previsualized photograph can be a real surprise, but it occurs periodically. If it happens to you, pursue it, because you may discover whole new worlds. Everyone has heard of scientific discoveries made because of an error in an experiment. The same thing can happen in photography if you consider the unexpected as an opportunity and ride the consequences through. In this type of postvisualization, there can be a realization that the print evokes a feeling different from—or even opposed to—your original intent. As with Caponigro, further thought may prove that the newly discovered statement is worthwhile, and a new approach to printing may further strengthen the altered concept.

The second form of postvisualization is more familiar: the unexpected discovery that cropping, or another alteration of the previsualized print, strengthens the intended statement. This is different from an expected cropping made necessary because you don’t have the precise focal length lens you need, or because the aspect ratio of length to width is different from that of your camera (e.g., you have a square format camera but you want a 4 × 5 image, or vice-versa). This form of postvisualization should be regularly practiced by all photographers.

Another form of postvisualization is the one used by Jerry Uelsmann. He starts by shooting whatever strikes him as interesting without analyzing why it interests him, what he wants to say about it, or how he wants the final print to look. Later, he combines these images to build a final image from components of the original photographs. Sometimes he may incorporate four, five, six or more negatives to build his final image, which usually has a decidedly surreal quality. This approach relies heavily on editing or experimentation or both, and it regularly opens unexpected avenues—a rare occurrence in photography that relies on previsualization alone.

Uelsmann’s surrealism is, appropriately enough, an unusual combination of postvisualization and previsualization—in that order! He photographs anything of casual interest to him with no forethought to the final result. Later he searches through his contact proofs for potential combinations that can produce unusual, bizarre, or decidedly surrealistic effects. At that point he starts to previsualize a final image to be cobbled together from combinations of the proof prints. It is indeed an unusual approach, and undoubtedly an exhilarating one, for Uelsmann has no idea what the final result will be when he exposes a negative. He doesn’t even know if the thing photographed will ever become part of one of his photographs.

Postvisualization is a prime ingredient of photomontage, in which a number of photographs (in combination, perhaps, with other visual art forms) are meshed together to form a final work. Multiple exposures, on the other hand, generally rely on previsualization and advanced planning. Rarely is an unintentional double exposure effective, though there are some spectacular examples of such fortuitous errors.

The conclusion of all this is twofold. First, numerous methods of arriving at the final print are valid. Second, the comments about communication near the end of Chapter 1 take on added importance. Whether the final print is a product of pre- or postvisualization, or a combination of the two, your goal is to elicit a response from the viewer. It is disheartening to show a print that evokes no response other than boredom. Even a strong response that is the opposite of your intent may be better than nothing. For example, imagine the feeling that Caponigro might experience if, after altering his apple print to evoke a feeling of cosmic space, the first viewer glanced at it and exclaimed, “What a wonderful apple!”

Cottonwood Canyon in Southern Utah is a geological and visual wonder with new and different surprises popping out throughout its length. Severe cropping eliminated unnecessary sky and foreground brush from the full 4x5 negative, focusing attention on the spectacular set of uplifts forming the Sawtooth. This is how I initially envisioned the image.