Mono Monday : : Sight

What could be a better way to photograph sight than to take a picture of a photographer?  She happened  to be doing a photo shoot in the clothing boutique I wrote about on Friday when I went in there to exchange something this morning. I put a picture of the model in extras.  I mentioned that attractive as she was, she wasn't exactly what I would call a "timeless shape" as advertised on the website, whereupon the owner asked me if I would like to be a model sometime….

Photography is a combination of what the photographer sees and what the person viewing the resulting image sees. How that image is taken and what is done to it afterward are the subject of endless and probably unresolvable discussion.I was talking to this photographer about methods of teaching photography and all the views on how much post production of images there should be, She said she was taught to shoot full frame and do very little editing. I said that struck me as a much easier proposition when one is shooting in a controlled environment. 

We don't always realize how much our brain edits out things like wires or rubbish bins. Often we don't even "see" them until we look through the lens of a camera. My practical mind tells me that if they are things that are always part of the landscape, why edit them out, but then I look at an image of that same landscape and realize how ugly the wires or bins are. I'm not sure, but I think that must have to do with the fact that we don't tend to put a frame around things unless we happen to be looking through the frame imposed on a scene by the lens. 

I'm not sure I agree with the folks who feel that in photography, "what you see is what you get". I like to think of shots as a starting place rather than an endpoint. I like the idea of adding layers to the image after I've taken it in the same way that this model was adding and changing layers of clothing to her body before the picture was taken. 

There are as many ways of seeing things as there are people in this world. If there are too many rules about what is done to an image our vision is narrowed.

At least that's the way I see it.