Revisiting old photos

The theme this month is "revise, reshoot, refine," but I can't help but add "revisit" to the list. If you've been reading this month's posts, you know that the theme is inspired by the writing process. When it comes to writing academic papers, I have a fairly tedious method. First, I cast the net wide. Let's say, for example, that I want to write about scientific instruments in the 17th and 18th centuries ("Why would anyone want to do that?" you say, and yet I did). I don't like to know exactly what I'm going to say in advance because it doesn't seem very honest. So I read book after book and take notes. I feel like I have to reach some sort of critical mass before I stop collecting notes and actually start writing. One of my best experiences in the "casting the net wide" phase of research was when after a couple of months in the same French library, the librarian let me browse the hidden stacks of not-yet cataloged rare books. For me, it was as if I had tamed the fox in The Little Prince. This is a complete digression, I know, but before I start making things apply to photography, I have to say that going through neglected books, papers, and ephemera is hands-down my favorite part of research (Don't get me started on my week at the Cooper-Hewitt with 12 boxes of papers related to the origins of industrial design or I'll never get this post done.) I like to think that it's the same feeling William Eggleston (one of my favorite photographers) has when he takes a picture of a ceiling fan or a stack of garbage bags.

Did I lose you yet? Let me bullet point my tedious research/writing process and then skip to how this applies to revisiting old photos:

• The initial phase leads to perhaps 100 pages of typed notes
• I then move on to the "notes of my notes" phase, where I pull out possibly relevant quotes and get it down to maybe 36 pages.
• Finally, I write the actual academic article (that will be read by far fewer people than this hasty blog post) and use only a fraction of those notes.

The parallels with photography seem clear, don't they?

• First, I take way too many photos (unlike Eggleston, by the way, who thinks that if you take more than one picture of the same thing, then it's just too painful to have to choose)
• Next, I rate my photos in Aperture. One star means "Why am I keeping this? I should really just delete this. Help! William Eggleston was right!" Two stars—i never use two stars, what's the point? Three stars means the photo has no major technical flaws. Four stars means I think this could be the one, but I don't want to commit until I have seen all the options. And five stars means I think the photo is worthy of actual post-processing attention.
• Post-processing doesn't mean I'll ever bother to print. A very small fraction of photos end up on my wall or in an album. And the ones that make it aren't always the best ones; they're just the best ones for a certain context.

But what happens to the rest? Are they worth revisiting?
This struck me when Becky from "Life with Kaishon" included the following photo of mine in her interview of me:

I actually love this photo, but I had completely forgotten about it. I took it two years ago as Eva was sleeping on my chair. She's five now, and the blanket is still a huge source of comfort for her, although most of the time it has to stay in her bed.

In my hunt for the original file in Aperture, I opened a folder of photos I took for her birth announcement and there it was—the blanket, making its pink and pristine début as a backdrop for our equally pink and pristine baby girl. I immediately made a diptych of the two photos:

There's an empty 8x10 frame on our wall that I have never gotten around to filling. Now, thanks to some digging through forgotten photos, these two become part of a printed composition.

The moral of this story is that a new context might give you a renewed interest in some images that would otherwise fall into oblivion. Take a little time and open one of those folders of neglected images. Wander the uncataloged stacks of your photo library. See what inspires you now. See what a little cross-referencing can do. Give something a chance to make it into print.

Eiffel Flowers: revisiting a discarded photo

I'm no fan of Photoshop's "artistic" filters. Just read my rant about pointillism. But that doesn't mean that I'm against manipulating images with some sort of artistic intent. The following is an example of coming back to a photo that was headed for the discard pile, looking at it in a new light, and using a revised version.

The original photo has pretty flowers and a generally good composition, but when I was sorting through which photos to give Wild Apple, I passed it by because the sky is "blown out." In other words, no pretty blue, no fluffy white clouds, just bright white. Blown out highlights and shadows with no detail are two of the top technical "flaws" that tend to bug photographers. I seriously question whether they are indeed flaws, or at least I think it depends on the style and emotion of a photo rather than on a fixed set of rules. Nevertheless, I was not aiming for a glaringly white sky when I took this photo, so I thought "too bad," gave it a low rating in Aperture, and moved on. But then I started toying around with a faux polaroid look (no, it's not one of those Photoshop artistic filters that I hate) on some other photos and decided that a blown out sky is as asset in light of the heavily smeared and dense color of polaroid style. With that style, the blank sky becomes greenish and helps set the tone for the rest of the photo.

Some people may react negatively, the way I did to the faux pointillism of Photoshop. Some people might prefer the first version. Or maybe you don't like either. Either way, the point is not universal appeal (if it is to you, then good luck with that), but rather something that appeals to me. The point is in the process of revision. First, I identified what bugged me about the original (i.e. white sky), then I thought of a way to resolve that problem (i.e. greenish polaroid sky), and suddenly I have a photo that I like (mostly. still not sure about the jagged border). An "Eiffel Flowers" photo rescued from the possible discards.

September Monthly Special: Revise, Reshoot, Refine

Original, snapped hastily in a rare moment without people sitting in them.

Revised: straightened, cropped, decided that the background was too static, added motion blur, punched up the color a bit, and voilà!

It's back-to-school time and since I am teaching four classes this semester—each of them with at least three writing assignments to grade— I know I will be pestering my students to spend more time revising their work. When choosing a theme for this month, I thought about three "Rs" of my photo taking process from my most recent trip to Paris: Revise, Reshoot, Refine.

I can't help but make comparisons between writing and photography (hey, etymologically, it means "light writing"after all). Here's what I wrote (and yes, it feels weird to be quoting myself) for some bio interview questions sent to me by Wild Apple (the company I recently signed with):

Probably because of my background in literature (PhD in French Literature), I think of photographic technique as a form of research and writing. I start with an idea, a concept, a sort of thesis. Just as I would use keywords to search a library database, I take my ideas out into the city and use them to create order out of all those possibilities. As a scholar, I have spent untold hours in the libraries of Paris pouring over old books and manuscripts, searching for the details that can take on new relevance and interest through my writing. As a photographer, I explore Paris as if it were a library filled with books—some of them well-read classics (the Eiffel Tower, the view from Notre Dame), and others, the overlooked stories waiting to be discovered. I am inspired by Victor Hugo’s assertion that when you know how to see, you can see the face of a king in a door knocker. In other words, the city itself has a language that the careful observer can learn to read. Of course, reading is not the only step. I also spend a lot of time revising/reshooting, editing, and refining. With Photoshop, I can literally cast my ideas in a different light again and again until I find the presentation best suited to the message.

So rather than focus on the more traditional concept of "composition," I want to think about the photographic print itself as a composition. In the selection and editing process, there is a moment when you decide "this is the version I'm going to print." How does that happen? How can we improve? What if we took a "finished" work and completely rewrote it?

My high school English teacher always told us that you never finish a composition, you abandon it. Kind of a negative way of looking at things, but that's exactly how my perfectionist tendencies speak to me:

perfectionist tendencies: You're going to turn that in? Really?

me: Um. yes. Why?

pt: It's just that, well, hmm. Oh it's probably nothing.

me: What's nothing?

pt: I'd probably make it more, you know—polished. But that's just me. Go ahead. Turn it in if you're happy with it. I'm sure it's very, uh, comment dirais-je?—adequate.

My perfectionist tendencies are a passive aggressive pain in the butt and naturally, they speak French. They love to say "impossible n'est pas français!" to which I reply, "Impossible is not French? Go into any store, ask for customer service. It's their favorite word."

But I digress...

My point is that shooting and editing photos is not unlike researching and writing a paper. Personally, I think it's a lot more fun, but it still requires work and attention to detail.

This month, as I sort through the 3000+ I took in Paris, I will be making a lot of editing decisions. Those decisions often involve revising my initial composition (i.e. cropping), and they always include refinements (or retouching) including color correction, noise reduction, and sharpening to creative choices. Sometimes, an almost-good-enough photo inspires me to go back and reshoot (which, for Paris, will have to wait until spring). For most of the month, I will focus on the many editing choices that go into a version of a photo that is worth the price of the print.

Note: I've decided to stop using "Mister Linky," but I still want you to participate by putting links in the comments. I'm looking at using a different tool based on a suggestion, but haven't had time to do it yet.