| William Neill made this photograph, "Agave Attenuata, Island of Maui, Hawaii," in 1994. It's a 4x5 film image. Since that time, it has been scanned to a digital file, and Neill has experimented with variations. Technology makes it easy to match images to your evolving creative vision. |
The art of photography is about interpretation. What's right and what's wrong? You, the artist, get to decide. Listening to Ansel Adams' lectures in my youth, and seeing the creative renditions he made from his negatives to the final prints, I learned that I need not adhere to a literal expression of my subjects.
From this lesson, I try not to be dogmatic about how I compose and process my images. I listen to my inner voice about whether my photographs reflect what I saw and felt. I steer clear of rules and norms as much as possible. I may end up creating an image that has a standard tonal range or compositional balance, but I'm not locked into that.
My photograph shown here was made in Hawaii with a 4x5 view camera and film in 1994. Years later, I scanned the transparency and, on my computer screen, "played" with the file first starting with a color version. My goal was to convey the subtle variations of the green in the leaves, but also to bring out the bright edges to heighten their graphic lines.
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My next step was to convert the photograph to black-and-white given the classic graphic nature of the subject. Strongly influenced by one of Adams' former assistants Don Worth (www.photographywest.com/pages/worth_photos.html), I took the tonalities in two different directions. Usually, when I explore such divergent interpretations, one of them jumps out as the best option. In this case, I love all three directions.
In both black-and-white photographs, I've created high-key and low-key versions by pushing the tones up or down. The low-key one shows the curve on the left side of the image's histogram emphasizing the dark grays, while the high-key image's tonal range is on the right side of the histogram.
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Will you come up with three variations for most of your images? No. Will most landscape and nature photographs work best with a full range of tones? Yes. My advice is simply not to limit yourself creatively.
To learn about William Neill's one-on-one Yosemite workshops, ebooks and iPad app, and to see his latest images, visit his website and photo-blog at www.williamneill.com.
Love the low key shot!
I presume the histograms for the black and white images were reproduced in the paper edition, but they are not visible on this Web page.
I like this series, and I like William Neill’s photography a lot.
Thanks for the feedback! As far as the histograms go, I did not include them but talked about them in a general sense assuming photogs know the basics.