To post-process or not?

*My son who was the model in the photos used in this article requested that the images be removed... I will prepare an equivalent set of photos to illustrate the article"

Some of the great photographers of the 20th century, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon among others were big advocates of not doing any post processing to ther pictures. Cartier-Bresson would not even print his own pictures, just sending away the film rolls. You can see in his prints, as well as in those of Avedon, the border of the negative.

Cartier-Bresson used to say that he knew when everything was in place to make a great shot in his viewfinder. "The decisive moment", as he titled one of his books. His concep was that of drawing. He saw the subject and made a quick instant drawing using the camera, in a way like sketching. Perharps this approach was essential to his photojournalistic style, that made a mark in the photography worls of his time.

Other photographers crop and post process their photos to obtain high quality prints.

Is one way better or more valid than the other?

I believe the answer is no. Both are valid and sound approaches to photography. Art becomes part of the loop at different points of the timeline. I also want to stress the phrase "20th century masters", meaning early 20th century. The film and paper period, when the work of these masters was shot with 35mm Leicas and 50mm lenses, as in the case of Cartier-Bresson, or in the large, extremely fine grained and detailed, 8x11 format of studio view cameras.

However the turn of the century brought to us digital media, and digital cameras make a very different scene. The outcome of the camera is always the same, we cannot tune the camera to different situation using different types of film. That is somethig we do in the post processing stages of our digital images. The shooting sessions are more focused in getting raw material that can be turned into good images later in the computer, rather than getting that one, single, perfect image of early 20th century photographers, who had fewer chances to shoot, and also the expense of doing so.

Some say that the ease of using digital cameras and the low cost of shooting, have made us less careful when shooting, and therefore less likely to get great images. Altough digital media makes it easy to be more generous with the number of images we store in our cameras, I do not agree that it makes us reckless about our photos, just shooting anything. I can see in many of today's younger photographers a very carefully conceived body of work, that is only enhanced by the enormous possibilities of digital image processing.

Let me show an example of how post processing an image has merit in itself, regardless of the source image.

At the right there is an arm-legth self portrait of my son. Although the raw photo does not have a great quality as it is, there some interesting features iin it. First, the angle at which it is taken is unusual, and the subject, fortunately, did not tilt his head upwards, just looking into the camera, thus putting an interesting accent in his eyes.



Light is very flat and there are a couple of distracting spots. So I first tried to tweak the light to make it more attractive, but I soon realized that the photo was in dire need of cropping. SInce the eyes are a very strong focal point I cropped to make them the main feature in the photo.







Then I decided that the edges were not strong enough, so I drew soft lines along some of the edges to get the image at the left.



In this photo the facial features are well accented but the image still lacks strength so the next move was to make a black and white version. In this image I applied yellow-orange filtering, increased the overall contrast and made the lines I had previously drawn along the edges, a bit stronger for a much more dramatic effect.

The final image has qualities not present in the original. I have shown how starting with a reasonable but not exciting photo, image processing work can add qualities that make that photo an interesting image.