Behind the Mirror

I love shooting fashion. What we wear and how we choose to present ourselves is one of the most complex of human endeavors. From the intricacies and complications of design, to the vagaries of changing purpose and taste, to the individual desire to express oneself in a particular manner to both familiars and to strangers, fashion is fascinating.

Shooting fashion is about 180 degrees from the documentary style photography I usually do. Shooting on the street, the observer is presented with the choices others have already made, and has no role in modifying either their presentation or location. With street photography, you get what you get. 

Fashion photography is contrived. The studio is an unnatural place to be, and people make different choices when they know they are going to be photographed. The subject is also contrived, in that it may not be the person in the clothes, but the clothes themselves, or the jewelry, or some other object. The placement of the model, the lighting, the mood and the moments captured are all unnatural to varying degrees. Because all these concerns (and more!) require active attention and balance, fashion photography is extremely difficult.

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A Tale of Three 50's (Leica, Nikon, and Fujifilm)

It was Charles Dickens who best summed up the state of photographic optics:

IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

In my case, however, it is not a comparison between two, but among three.

In the days of film, the comparison of optics largely came down to how fast and how sharp. Low dispersion glass made sharper images, but the choice of film could easily negate any advantages brought by the glass. To be sure, Leica lenses gave images a different feel, but again—printing any image onto Kodak Polycontrast paper was the great equalizer. Without a good match between gear, film, paper, and presentation, the differences in optical quality were easily lost to the eye. 

Similar problems exist with digital images: what I edit on my 30 inch, color corrected display is not what is likely to be seen on a Dell notebook display, or on a smartphone. And it will look different when it's printed on paper.

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X-Wrong (with the X-Rite Color Checker)

The biology of color perception is extraordinarily complex. Even controlling for individual differences (color blindness, age, culture, vision correction. . . the list is endless), we are left with two main issues: the creation of colors, and the viewing of the image.

These are not simple issues. As explained by Paul Smith:

Colors next to each other, or in a global harmony, affect each other's hue, intensity, and saturation, and thus need to be very carefully "tuned." Each patch of color affects the apparent size and position in depth of the others which is why details of Impressionist paintings sometimes look flat and badly drawn in isolation, but seem "correct" when seen in the context of the whole painting. 

Impressionism: Beneath the Surface, at 158. 

Getting these colors in tune and harmonious is an enormous amount of work. Indeed, it's the makings of madness. Smith relays the story behind the white knuckles of Cézanne's Portrait of Ambroise Vollard:

. . . Cézanne worked up the whole depicting surface as a single entity, constantly reworking the various parts so that they stayed in harmony after each addition or alteration. Essentially, the problem was that every time Cézanne added a touch to the painting it had to be modulated to harmonize with what was already there; either that, or the exiting portions of the painting had to be brought into harmony with the new touch. . . . Vollard recalls: " . . . In my portrait, there are two little spots on the hand where the canvas is not covered. I pointed them out to Cézanne. He replied: '... I may be able to find the right color with which to fill in those blank patches. But understand a little, Monsieur Vollard, if I put something there at random, I would be forced to begin my painting again, starting from that point.

Id. at 159-160.

Cézanne took months to work through these color problems—but he never found the right colors for Vollard's knuckles.

Making adjustments to photographs is a much more direct process, but the artistic challenge is the same: achieving tonal harmony in a photograph requires the same visual approach and care which a painter takes, and can be extremely frustrating. 

For photographers, the process starts with the scene itself: evaluating the light, contrast, colors, and tones, which leads to decisions of framing. Different lenses and cameras, as well as ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, will affect how the scene is captured, so the "framing" decision is a complex one. After those decisions have been made and the shutter is clicked, the photographer is left with a raw negative or file, and a new artistic process begins in developing the image.

With an achromatic image, each development change in highlights, shadows, or midtones requires a corresponding adjustment elsewhere to maintain visual balance. Dodging and burning is no simple task. When color gets added to the mix, it becomes exponentially more difficult. 

Printing notes by Pablo Inirio, master darkroom printer at Magnum Photos.

And then, of course, there's also the consideration of the differences in visual perception caused by different printed mediums and sizes. A glossy magazine page held close is a different spectator experience than a large print viewed several feet away. 

These considerations get overwhelming. There's many an image I get stuck on, unable to hold onto the balance, and start to feel a bit of the Cézanne panic. Very often I abandon those images for a time and try to understand them later.

This often frustrating process has led me to seek out sources of stability and predictability. I make all kinds of final product: from web images, to post cards, to magazines, to large prints. I know what I don't know, and there's always a bit of trepidation when I'm trying to develop an image for a final production for which I don't have a strong understanding. Having a common thread would be a bit of comfort. 

All of which is preface to my brief experience with the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Photo. From the company that brings you Pantone colors, the ColorChecker is a three-paged, passport-sized set of swatches that provide a controlled and universal reference for both white balance and colors. Paired with a magic bit of software, the idea is to take an image of the ColorChecker at the beginning of a shoot, and then generate a custom profile to allow consistent color correction, no matter the light source. While it doesn't solve the artistic considerations of what you want to do with those colors, my hope was that it would at least give me a standard starting point for all the images I make.

Starting a studio session with Nicole.

Alas, the dream was not realized. Set up was relatively direct, but the first clue that the product possibly is outdated is the Flash-based instructional "video." Although I sometimes miss certain aspects of the 1990's, bad instructional videos are not one of them. 

I soldiered on, however, following the instructions. After installing the software, generating profiles is relatively direct—except that to access a new profile, Lightroom has to relaunch. That slows things down quite a bit. It might have been worth the price if the resulting profile did the job.

But it didn't. Despite repeated tests in all sorts of lighting scenarios, using Leica, Canon, and Fuji cameras, in nearly every case I found that the Adobe Standard profile gave better skin tones than the X-Rite. In those cases where I didn't feel Adobe Standard was doing the job, the Camera Faithful profile did. And both of those profiles are accessible without generating a unique profile for each session of images. 

The pace of software and hardware innovation has likely left the X-Rite behind, with fast processors in digital cameras making all sorts of contemporaneous lighting measurements and writing that data along with the image itself. (And it certainly appears that the company hasn't felt it worth its while to update the software.) Although I'm sure the X-Rite is useful in certain situations, and may even be useful with older digital cameras, I found that it only complicated my workflow and provided a more confusing outcome than sticking with Adobe Standard.

In the end, any consistent standard can provide a base from which to work. If nothing else, the X-Rite helped me confirm that Lightroom's color profiling is close enough, and consistent enough, that I might as well start there. I'll seek peace in that knowledge, so that I can avoid the color matching madness of Cézanne! 

Death by a Thousand Colors (The demise of a Canon 20D)

Wandering the grounds of Edith Wharton's estate, a writer friend and I became involved in a discussion of creative blocks—the motivations of both writers and photographers to create, how they differed, the similarities, and the differing approaches to overcoming  impediments to the creative impulse.

A woman walks the grounds of The Mount.

At the root of it all, "writer's block" is the inability to produce. The spark of creativity is not something within conscious control, and the loss of that spark is a painful experience for any creative person. The desire to make something is there, but the "what" is gone, and seemingly unretrievable. It's minimally frustrating, and at its worse can lead to madness. 

Writers live in a different world of creative production than photographers. Writing projects tend to be long, many-stepped affairs, which are often outlined and diagrammed and table-of-contensed. The writer has control of the project because the story is within the writer's mind. 

In contrast, even when a photographer is working on a large project the events which present themselves as opportunities for images may or may not work out for reasons beyond the photographer's control: the light could be off, the action might not fit the concept, or there just may be nothing interesting to see. These are blocks to creative production, but the blocks are external. For the photographer, the solution is to keep moving and look for a better situation, a better angle, better light. 

Where photographers experience something more similar to writer's block is when the ability to observe suffers. Sometimes there are too many distractions, or stresses, or the consciousness is too absorbed to allow the mind to see well (like when one is having a conversation about creative blocks). Then, it matters little what the event is or where the scene takes place—if the mind can't see, then images don't get made.

It's frustrating to experience any kind of creative block, but the answer is often the same: to shock the mind back into action. Which led to the question I asked my writer friend: "How much would you pay to get rid of writer's block? $100? $1,000?" When the mind has gotten stuck, it's a fair bet that a person would pay quite a lot in whatever form to be able to move forward again.

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Cut Off at the Knees [The Gestalt of People Pictures]

When making images of people, there's a constant tension between being close enough to provide intimacy and detail, and far enough to provide a full view of the person. More often than not, images of a person sacrifice the physical whole for the physical parts. Where we cut off the parts isn't an easy question, and isn't subject to a rule.

Instead, like any framing decision, the choice of what parts of a person stay in a frame is a question of gestalt. 

One of the most erudite thinkers on visual perception and art is Rudolph Arnheim, and it is to him we turn to define the issues of how we frame images of people. First, some quotes from his classic Art and Visual Perception:

“There is no point to visual shapes apart from what they tell us.” p.4

“[T]he mind always functions as a whole. All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.” p. 5

“No object is perceived as unique or isolated. Seeing something involves assigning it a place in the whole: a location in space, a score on the scale of size or brightness or distance.” p. 11

“[F]actors such as size, color, or direction contribute to visual balance in ways not necessarily paralleled physically.” p. 20

Applying these observations about visual perception to the framing of a portrait, the photographer's challenge is to perceive the whole of the image, and not to treat the subject as a butcher would: picking severable joints. How the whole comes together is a function of light, shadow, form, and the visual weight and meaning of each of those elements to the viewer. Whether or not the image has a gestalt balance won't be determined by where limbs are cut off.

The questions of balance and completeness in an image are artistic, and therefore there aren't an hard and fast rules. Understanding how the mind works in perceiving visual elements, though, enables the photographer to make purposeful decisions when framing, and to understand why certain images “work” while others don't. Sometimes we can cut off parts and retain the meaning of the whole. The challenge is picking the right parts, and in appreciating that any subject exists within the context of the whole frame. Again, Arnheim:

Good fragments are neither surprisingly complete nor distressingly incomplete; they have a particular charm of revealing unexpected merits of parts while the the same time pointing to a lost entity beyond themselves. A similar coherence of the total structure exists in organic shape. The geneticist Waddington says that although whole skeletons have a “quality of completeness,” which resists additions or omissions, the single bones have only “a certain degree of completeness.” Their shape carries implications about the other parts to which they are attached, and when isolated they are “like a tune which breaks off in the middle.”  p.78.

Gestalt is the key to picking up the broken tune: although any particular part is primarily identified by its category (e.g., a hand belongs to a body; a tire belongs to a vehicle), the parts included in a composition achieve a higher level of belonging to the whole of the image. Where we are able to liberate a part from its original category and make it part of a new one, we can achieve a higher level of artistic presentation.

What you see is what you get

A couple of examples may help:

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This studio image of Sydney has many simple gestalt forms. Because of the starkness of the black and white, it's easy for a spectator to perceive the repeated highlight shapes (in red), which visually form a vertical line. The highlights are paralleled by the black shapes, which give dimensionality to the highlights. There are also several strong diagonal lines running both vertically (blue) and horizontally (green). Because the image is strongly achromatic, and because the repetition of highlights and shapes is numerous, the cut off legs and hidden right arm don't stand out very much, if at all. The whole dominates the parts.

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This image of a boy in Iran is more difficult. His left hand is cut off. If we only look at the boy, the missing part creates tension. Because the boy is about center in the frame, and closer to us, we tend to look at him as a whole, and the missing hand is disconcerting. (If the missing hand is intentional to create tension, no worries.) 

But if we view the boy in the context of the entire frame, his left arm becomes a gestalt element. Rather than being an "arm," it's a vertical line which plays off other vertical lines in the frame (red), just as his right arm plays off the other diagonal lines in the frame (blue). The image moves from being about the boy, to being about a repetition of a very few gestalt forms. If the image were of the isolated boy, I wouldn't like the tension created by the missing hand. As a whole, however, I don't mind it at all because it functions to drive the spectator to view it as a gestalt element, and look for other such elements. These obviously are artistic choices, but the goal is for those choices to be informed by an understanding of how the mind perceives form.

As we have previously discussed, gestalt only occurs in a frame. That makes it difficult to perceive without constant practice. So next time you lift your camera, shift your attention away from the primary subject and take a look at the whole. You'll be surprised by how much you see!