Journal | A genius, so to speak, for sauntering

The real color

Thursday · April 2, 2009 | posted under: Digital Alterations · Musings · Photography Techniques | 0 comments

Bronc Rider | Wyoming

Would the real color please step forward (click to swap examples)
Color Print • Lightroom 'Polaroid' • Black and white • 'Original'

Although it's been years since I've loaded a roll of 35mm film into a camera, I still shoot some transparency and b&w film in large and medium formats. I like the options my 4x5 camera affords and the digital options in large format are neither yet affordable nor practical for the kind of subjects for which I'll grab the view camera. Slide film encouraged a simple-minded approach to color and realism—the real colors were the colors on the slide. You placed the film on a color balanced light table and there was the real world in front of you. Of course we all knew that we were choosing film based certain characteristics like color temperature and saturation, but there was the impression that the film had authority and it was somewhat sacrosanct. The choices concerning color were made in-camera through the use of filters and gels. When you brought film into the digital domain via the scanner, it was almost always with an eye for accuracy. The film was on the light table while you made adjustments and you tried to match it—after all it was a lot of work to get that color on film. Digital photography has liberated us from this folly, but at the same time has deprived us of the reference we had in the slide. Regardless of how arbitrary the reference was, it made life simpler.

Today the workflow has changed, the chemists in Rochester and Japan are no longer holding our hands. When shooting RAW images, the digital camera places the color choices squarely in your lap. You find yourself floating in this color space: warmer or cooler? more vivid? black and white? What used to be a quality of the medium is now a choice made by the photographer on each and every image. The color is beholden to our memories, or wished-for color universes, or simply limitation of our technique and software. When looking at the above image and exploring Lightroom's processing options, I find myself still fighting the old paradigm: I catch myself feeling like departures from the raw image, even subtle ones, are manipulations and deviations, of which I'm instinctively skeptical, from some original despite knowing that this original is a chimera—there is no original and there never really was. The old slide was no more correct than the polaroid or the negative. This is a lesson we could have learned a long time ago but chose not to.