The Decisive Moment

If you’re a regular visitor to The Decisive Moment you may have noticed that a few things around the site have changed today.

We’ve been thinking about how we can improve the site and as a result have made the following changes:

• Increased the width of the site to allow for better, clearer navigation
• Added a “people we like” section to the left hand navigation to share some of the websites we come across that we think you aught to know about
• Made it easier for you to leave comments
• Made it easier for you to contact us with your comments, questions and suggestions

We hope that the changes really have improved the way you interact with the site. These things always involve a bit of trial and error and it’s only by listening to you, our readers, that we can tell if we’re getting things right. If you think we haven’t please let us know. If you think we have, still let us know. We love the praise!

Our aim is to create the best communal website for photographers. This is a continual process and with this in mind we are considering the following ideas for for future updates to the site:

• Adding a discussion forum
• Running competitions
• Adding a polling system to the site so we can get your opinion on various topics
• Adding a directory of photographers and services
• Adding a section where you can share your photography with others

By no means will all of these ideas happen right away. It may be that some of them are awful ideas. We’re just not sure yet. Again let us know what you think either by leaving a comment below or by using our enquiry form.

Right. That’s it for now. Back to writing about photography.

I was doing a bit of browsing - as you do - and came across the oldest example of a permanent photograph. If you click the image above you’ll get a large version to look at.

It was produced in 1826 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The photo is called, “View from the Window at Le Gras” and took eight hours to expose.

It’s remarkable that not even two hundred years have passed and yet technology has advanced so much that we can now not only create images with thousands of times more detail but can go from pressing the shutter release to having a processed and printed image in seconds.

If you’d like to know more about the history of photography check out this great entry on Wikipedia.

Now I have to confess, I am one of those people who really meant to do something. Just been waiting for the right opportunity. Like backing up all those valuable and irreplaceable digital photos living on my computer’s hard drive.

Well, not so long ago, my hard drive actually did go bang and (in spite of calling in the help of a buddy who knows far more about the hardware side of PCs than I do) the files were completely lost. Included among those files were almost 4,000 pictures of my kids (4,000 in four years - I know, I know, it’s pathetic!) which, apart from a very small handful, had not been printed.

This is the nightmare all of us digital photographers fear and yet I’m willing to bet the vast majority of us do little about it. I was very lucky. About four months before the exploding hard drive, my wife’s uncle and aunt lost many of their most prized possessions in a house fire. The realization that I could so easily lose all photographic records of my kids since birth hit me like a wet kipper in the face; I rushed straight out and purchased an external USB hard drive, backed up all my photos and took the drive to my office.

Like I said, I was very lucky. Think about how much your photos (not just the digital ones) mean to you and do something about securing them. Backing up photos regularly takes a little thought and planning, but the alternative makes it worth the work.

I’m about to embark on a project to see if we can restore the photos which were damaged but rescued from the fire. I’m hoping I can clean up the older photos, or possibly scan them and digitally restore them. I’ll be writing an article about the experience, but if anyone can offer any advice I would be really grateful.

We’ve been discussing the recent controversy surrounding one of Nan Goldin’s photographs that was recently seized by police from an exhibition due to fears that it might breach pornography laws. We ended up asking if the work was even really art or just a snapshot. This got me thinking about what constitutes art so I thought I’d write a post about.

So what does count as art? Well my trusted Pocket Oxford English Dictionary says, ‘art – n, 1. the expression of creative skill in a visual form such as painting or sculpture. 2. paintings, drawings, and sculpture as a whole.’ Well I guess that should include photography too (goes to show how old my dictionary is). So by definition it doesn’t really matter what I paint, draw or photograph or indeed how I go about doing so, it can all be classified as art.

I don’t think that’s a good enough definition though. I think art needs to be more than that to be called art. Surely for something to be art there aught to be some sort of expression within it or at least some sort of meaning to it, and not just that, but a meaning or expression that the artist intended to be in there and is in someway communicated by the piece.

Is the definition of art a personal thing? Often I’ve heard people say that something isn’t art, seemingly just because they don’t like it, so is the reverse true? Can something only be art if you like it? There have always been artists who have challenged our perception of art. Artists like Andy Warhol and more recently Damien Hirst, to name just two, have created pieces that have caused uproar within society. Does this mean they can’t really be considered art?

Is the question answered by the subject of the piece? For instance is a photograph of starving children in a war torn country taken by a news reporter art? After all the primary function of the photography here would be reportage. The most important thing is that the photograph offers a realistic portrayal of the situation. Is it even wrong to call it art? If it isn’t wrong to call it art, isn’t it at least disrespectful to the subjects of the photo to consider it as such? Would a photographic reproduction of Constable’s “The Hay Wain” support the opposite argument?

What counts as art for you?

An experiment

If you would, take a look at the photo above. I took it a few years ago and at the time I had every intention for it to be labeled art. I won’t share with you what I think of it now, but I will when the results are in. Is it art? Let us know what you think, leave us a comment.

Firstly, I feel I should apologize for the appalling title of this article - to you for insulting your intelligence and to the family of Edwin Starr for causing him to turn in his grave!

I’m not going to bang on about the benefits of shooting your digital photos in RAW mode or what you can and can’t do in the processing stage. This is all pretty well documented elsewhere. Really, I just want to underline the simple, fundamental and yet apparently often overlooked truth about shooting RAW:

RAW is there to allow you to achieve the best possible quality from your digital camera, not to allow you to compensate for shoddy technique.

Yes, you can tweak the exposure, the contrast range, the sharpness, blah, blah, blah to “fix up” the under/over exposure, poor lighting arrangement, etc. However, capturing the “perfect” RAW image in the first place allows you to manipulate the photograph to express your creativity instead of forcing you into a rescue attempt.

In the days of film (oh, here we go again!) you paid a much higher price for shoddy workmanship. You learnt that your method of capturing the image was directly relational to the finished picture. Perfecting your exposure technique would save you time and potentially a huge amount of money.

Now that many of us work in an entirely digital workspace, we don’t consider cost in terms of materials. We can shoot as many pictures as we like, load them on our computers, manipulate them and only commit to paper those images we are happy with. But there is still a cost - pride. Have you ever presented a client with a picture you knew was not really up to the mark? One that you did a pretty good job of rescuing, considering what you had to work with? Did it eat away at you?

Modern cameras, whilst they are truly technological wonders, do not “understand” light, they merely measure a small sample of it as a guide. It is up to you how that image is captured. Stop and think for a moment before you release the shutter.

Strive for perfection. The processing stage will become much more enjoyable, I promise you.