We all begin with a SOOC image. Everyone of us does. What is a SOOC image? It’s a Straight Out Of Camera image. One that hasn’t yet met your creative post-processing sensibilities. There are a great many of the greats of photography for whom SOOC is the only way to go, and aside from maybe a slight boost in saturation or contrast, “what-they-see-is-what-they-get” and all of their “art” is in their composition and subject (and of course, the light!) Photography legends like Jay Maisel is just such a photographer. When he went digital after a storied career shooting high-end advertising assignments on chrome analog films, he told his digital tech assistant “Do not do anything to my images in Photoshop that I would not do myself with film.” Essentially for him and a whole pantheon of legendary great film photographers, SOOC is the purest form of photography.
But that’s not me. Since my beginning with analog film photography in high school, I was fascinated with the malleability of film. With how it can be manipulated, pulled, stretched ( so-to-speak), and in all ways I could think of, “abstracted.” For me, the SOOC was too easy, too facile, and felt like the camera itself did all the work. I wanted to put more of myself and my creative sensibility into my work. I felt a natural affinity for Minor White’s admonition to students when he said, “Don’t just photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” This spurred me to try all kinds of manipulations to find out “what the image wanted to be.” I know that may sound a bit “new-agey” (a term I hate, but it will do), but I believe photography (and many other art forms) is a direct dialogue between the artist and their medium of choice. A big part of dialogue is the “listening” and it is in this listening process that the artist comes to understand where a work wants to go on the way to becoming.
This image began as I came across a lone feather on a sidewalk. It was not particularly remarkable at first sight as evidenced by the SOOC image at the top of this post. Taken with my iPhone X with the native camera, I thought, “maybe I could do something with it.” As I looked closer after taking the image (being mindful of my composition. Always pay attention to composition 😉), I noticed some iridescence to the feather that the SOOC did not immediately reveal. Once I did some very basic edits using the native Photos app, I brought up exposure, contrast and saturation which revealed the iridescence I was hoping to see. Adding some sharpness and the HDR filter in the Snapseed app, I was very pleased with the jewel-like quality shown above. I almost stopped here, thinking I made the most of the image. But as nice as this image may be, I still wasn’t satisfied with it completely.
So for fun and “listening” to the image wanting to be more, I took the processed image into one of my favorite iPhone apps, Hipstamatic. This app has a rich set of tools, but my first stop was in choosing the “film” I would use. Hipstamatic has a great many choices in films and lenses you can choose from, and as my habit with an image, I will sample all the choices of film (and often Lens combos) until I get something I like. This time, when I hit this particular film with this imag, and it created this abstraction, I was stunned! Usually this film renders results that are often not to my liking. This time I was like, “YES!” That’s it, that’s what this image wants to be. And I almost stopped there…
For some unknown reason, or perhaps to see how far the envelope could be pushed, I re-ran the same original image as before through the same film in Hipstamatic and to my surprise and delight, I got a totally different render of the image. This one looked even cooler than the first, and reminded me of a pair of wings (in an abstract sense.) This all was seriously pushing my creative buttons and making me embrace the nature of abstraction in a new way. Still, I was curious…
So I ran the process a third time with the original processed feather, and wouldn’t you know, a third variation was created! I finally felt with this last one that the image had become what it most wanted to be. But not only that, I decided that all three images deserved to be together. Not as a tryptic proper, but as three separate jewels in a glorious series of abstraction. Not every image is worthy of being abstracted (tell that to Picasso and the Cubists!), but if you don’t experiment and try various ways, and in fact use multiple various ways as I often teach, if you don’t “listen” to your images as you engage in the creative process, you may never know what an image could potentially be. Abstraction may or may not be your cup of Earl Grey ☕️, but if you can learn to love and appreciate the varied ways that artists see the world, and in fact you yourself can see your world in multiple ways at the same time, how rich and wonderous your world will be!
*To see more of my “abstract” images you can visit my :: FIVE :: gallery where these feather images hang, along with 100 of my iPhone images.