This week in pictures
FTLComm - Tisdale - Saturday, December 11, 2010
Each picture is identified with the time and date it was taken. One of the goals a photographer, or historian for that matter, is for each and every picture to tell a story of its own. Sometimes, this is achieved with a group of pictures which tie a theme together, but when you come right down to it, the individual image, to be good, needs to be able to stand on its own, telling the viewer something.
What a picture tells is very much up to the viewer. The photographer must use composition, light and shadow, texture and emotional impact of elements in the image, to present something that has a visual dialogue. That dialogue is not pre-determined, but depends upon the experience of the viewer.
The viewer brings to the experience their background, the mood they are in at the time and the memories, or illusions that are triggered by the image with which they are confronted. What gets really complex is the hidden contextual message that sometimes pop out of images.
Hidden contextual messages can be the over all composition, or apparent lines that seem to be in the image, but are for the most part, laid on by the viewers imagination. Advertisers like to fool around with this sort of thing in magazines, where they use one image, or ad, on one page that will shadow through to the image on the page printed on the other side. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is a quirk of layout fate. But in a flat single image, the buried symbols are only hinted at, or are accidents created by the photographer.
With the use of PhotoShop post image manipulation can further bring out, or submerge these pictures within a picture. Just so you understand, the pictures in this set were not processed with PhotoShop. They came from the camera and were cropped, straightened, colour adjusted and the contrast tuned up, using Apple’s iPhoto software. The version used with these pictures is 9 as I am switching over to 11 at the end of the month.