Meaning in the background

Here is a great photo. I can't link to it directly. It's currently the sixth photo on the Wall Street Journal's Photos of the Week page for February 15-19, 2010.

Please click on the thumbnail above to view the photo full size on the WSJ page, then come back. Photo credit: Thierry Roge/Reuters. Remember, you have to scroll down to the sixth photo.

What's special about this photo?

If you simply glanced at the photo, what you saw is a fairly pretty picture of a man carrying a young girl across train tracks in some snow. If you took a second glance at the picture, you may also have noticed emergency personnel in the middle ground, carrying a stretcher. It's not clear if the person on the stretcher is sick, or wounded or dead.

But if you kept looking at the photo for just one more second, you finally found the "punch line", almost but not quite hidden in the background. Look closely and you can just make out the train cars that are lifted unnaturally off the track. And then you realize that the photo shows the aftermath of a terrible train crash.

Photographer Thierry Roge focuses on the man in the foreground with a fairly wide aperture, but without opening the aperture up all the way. The fairly wide aperture leaves the men in the middle ground a little out of focus, and leaves the train cars behind them a little more out of focus. The snow helps, too, by softening the edges of people and things, especially behind the man and girl in front.

Of course, good photographers do this all the time—deliberately blurring the background. But often we blur the background because the stuff in the background is not terribly important, or because we're trying to throw the viewer's attention entirely on the foreground. I try to shoot brides in dressing rooms as wide open as possible for the absolute minimum depth of field, because most of the dressing rooms I've taken photos in were fairly cluttered and uninteresting.

But in Thierry's train-wreck photo, the blurred or not-quite-in focus background is terribly important. He's not hiding it. He just doesn't want you to notice it first. He wants you first to see the man and the little girl. The story of the photo is the human drama. The wrecked trains in the background are only the explanation or back story.

The Napalm Girl

Actually, this technique is one that great news photographers are fond of. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples. One of the most famous is the great, Pulitzer-Prize winning Vietnam War photo by AP Photographer Nick Ut, commonly known as the "Napalm Girl photo." The photo shows a naked little girl (Kim Phuc) running down a street. At first, you only notice the naked girl, and you notice that she's crying. Then you notice the American soldiers, perhaps on the right side of the photo (if it's cropped wide), certainly behind the girl and following her down the road toward the camera. And further behind them all, you see a vague, billowing, terrible cloud of smoke. The smoke—and the fire that must be with it—appears to be a "safe" distance in the background, but the condition of the girl connects her suffering with the fire, which, as we all know, was caused by napalm. Note that your eye is drawn deeper into the photo by the road, just as the Thierry photo of the train crash draws your eye deeper as you follow the train tracks back.

Pictures and stories

One of the reasons that I call photos like these truly "great" is that they are so self-sufficient. They don't need captions. You need a caption, perhaps, to know that the train wreck occurred in Brussels, Belgium. But that's a relatively unimportant detail. Compare Thierry's photo to the other train photo further down on the same page (taken in South Africa), or to the photo of the burning building (in Austin, Texas). You won't be able to guess the story from the photo without reading the caption. That's not a knock against those photos. The photo of the man standing on the front "bumper" of the South African train is a particularly arresting image and a fine photo. But the truth is, most pictures do not tell a story; pictures are very seldom worth a thousand words. So when you get one that does tell a story so completely, it's a sure sign of greatness.

Here's looking at you, kid

While I am a heckuva good-looking guy, and of course a brilliant photographer, I am, well, let's just say I'm not George Clooney. I remind myself of this when I try to take my own photo, as I do once a year or so. My latest self-portrait effort was motivated by my desire to get a new photo for my Google Buzz profile. Here's what I came up with.

Not too bad, sez me. That's the dimpled hunk I look at in the mirror at least twice a day, when I brush my teeth and (optionally) shave and/or comb my hair. Unfortunately, that isn't me. That's me in a mirror. This is me:

And this chump isn't nearly as good looking. He looks, I dunno, backwards or something. I feel in the first photo like my hair is nicely composed, while in the second photo, it's a bit wispy and mussed. Of course, the second photo = the first photo, except that the image has been flipped horizontally and sharpened.

Perhaps if I took more photos of myself—or had more photos of me taken, preferably by someone with great tact as well as photographic skill—I'd get used to my own mug. But perhaps not. One thing I do know is that it's harder to use on yourself the little tricks we photographers use on our subjects to try to make them look their best. When you have to face the mirror with a camera, well, the camera doesn't lie.

The photographer excludes

Brief but excellent essay over at Luminous Landscape: "The Photographer Excludes," by Peter Cox.

There's a saying: "The painter includes; the photographer excludes". A painter will include only those elements in a composition which they expressly want. A photographer, on the other hand, must work out how to exclude distracting elements. This is a large part of the challenge in making great images.

I liked Cox's example of how he took a photo that he initially thought was no good and, by cropping it further, turned it into one of his favorites. I learned the importance of cropping decades ago when I was editing my college yearbook. Time after time I turned a bad photo into one that was merely mediocre by cropping tightly. I was less often able by cropping to turn a mediocre photo into a good one.

I wrote about cropping last year ("Crop rotation"). When I shoot a wedding or other event, I tend these days to include a bit more of the scene than I think necessary. I do this for a simple practical - one might even say commercial - reason: I want to make it possible for my clients to crop the photo to whatever print size they prefer.

But I have to confess that I feel guilty about this. We don't have an infinite number of print sizes available to us or anything like, but we do have a variety of sizes and aspect ratios. And it makes sense, at least in terms of artistic principle, that a photo that, say, ought to be presented at a 1:2 aspect ratio, should be so presented and that I should be insistent about it. This photo from my daughter's dance studio, for example, is only interesting at 1:2. At the camera's original 2:3 aspect ratio, the effect of the photo - the chopping and distortion created by the long and wide mirror - is almost completely lost. To print (or display) this at any other aspect ratio would be a mistake.

I wish I had the nerve to tell my brides that a 2:3 photo may be printed at 4"x6" or even 8"x12" (which is one of my pro lab's options) but that it definitely should not be cropped to fit a 5"x7" or 8"x10" frame. If the frame is indeed the essence of the photo - and I believe it is - then monkeying around with the frame ought to be regarded as a no-no, as doing damage to the photo.

Ah, but I make more from an 8"x10" print than I do from a 4"x6". And if the bride's mother wants an 8"x10", I'll do what I can to accommodate.

What's coming here in Big D

Couple of things for photography lovers to look forward to here in Dallas.

If you're on the email list for AfterImage Gallery in the Dallas Quadrangle (proprietor Ben Breard), you know already that they're pulling some great pieces out of their amazing inventory. I'm planning a trip down there very soon.

And the Dallas Museum, which I don't usually think of as a major venue for photography, is sponsoring this spring an exciting exhibition titled "The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874". Yeah, it's an awkward title but that's the case with a lot of exhibitions. Anyway, for more info, check out the exhibit page on the Dallas Museum web site, here. Exhibit will run February 21 through May 23, 2010.

A study in contrasts

I don't "make" photographs, I take them, or at least that's how I think of it. I see the photo, I shoot it. The contrasts here tickled me, so I grabbed a camera and a flash and captured the moment. (Click photo to enlarge.)

I call it "Juanita (95), Catherine (14)." Seems subtler than calling it "Old Age and Youth."

This is a rare instance of a photo that I ran through Photoshop. In the original, the blank wall on the left takes up something closer to 60% of the width of the shot, in other words, there's more white space between the nonagenarian and the teenager. I simply removed a small amount of the blank white space in order to make the two halves of the photo more nearly balanced. Does this slight editing - removal of empty space - mean that the resulting photo has been "made" and not "taken"? There's a line somewhere, that separates corrective processing from creative editing. The small change I made here might be close to that line, but I don't think it crosses it.

Have you seen this kitten?

Our cats are indoor cats. The older cat, Mao, is smart enough to realize this is a good deal for her, but Kiki, the latest addition to our menagerie, has the typical adolescent's curiosity about things that aren't actually good for her, and two days ago, somehow she managed to slip out of the house, probably while I was going out to the deck where I was grilling salmon for dinner. We hunted for her that night inside and out but she ended up spending the night outdoors, and it was a cold night.

The next day, she didn't return in the morning, so I made a flyer to distribute in the neighborhood. I have a number of photos of her, but I picked a photo of her and Catherine. It's a satisfactory photo as a description of Kiki: You can see that she's a black kitten with white on her face and chest. But I chose this photo especially because it has Catherine in it. Most lost animal flyers show only the animal. I thought it would get people's attention to show them that this kitten is dearly loved and missed by a young girl.

I'm happy to report that, late in the second day - twenty-four hours exactly after her disappearance - Kiki responded to Catherine's calls from the back porch, crawled out from under our house where apparently she had spent the night, and let Catherine pick her up and bring her back in. She had no doubt heard me calling her over and over, but she ignored me and responded to Catherine. Well, I'm very relieved to have her back home.

The blog's new web address

I finally got around to tying this blog more closely to my domain. You can now get here using this address:

http://blog.william-porter.net

You might want to update your bookmark!