about editing photos

now, editing, that's a whole other monster

i am quite convinced that editing and taking photos are two totally different activities with different goals and methods and necessary mind states and completely different (when not antagonistic) sets of skills and needed personality types, that just happen to have the misfortune of needing each other to achieve the goal of producing an image. it's like buying books and actually reading them. or having to get a girlfriend to have a girlfriend. processes that, most of the time, would desire they didn't involve each other at all. i guess you could say they are two faces of the same coin, but the analogy is too overused already to apply it to yet another subpar example. the reason they are so different is because they happen in totally different circumstances with a whole lot of different constraints. when taking photos, you are interacting with reality, hunting instants out of it, so you should behave like an explorer of a reality you don't fully belong to and maybe don't even believe in, extracting from the canary mine what can be extracted to come back to the surface with the goods. when editing photos, you are reinterpreting your found material and giving it form and are by yourself, actively deciding what something actually is or should be, and so you should behave like an emperor actively drawing imaginary lines on the sand.

and that can be incredibly uncomfortable.

because editing is not just about a mechanical task of enhancing an image, fixing it, or making it aesthetically pleasant. there are so many ways you could do that, so many angles for color, cropping, contrasting, subduing, changing lights, that you are effectively deciding what your photos did actually photograph. it's retroactive interpretation of a memory, more akin to dreaming than to seeing. almost the opposite of what we were doing before.

that being said, the product is still grounded on a lived reality. a lot of photographers shield behind purely impressionist views of their craft, and forget that part of the power of photography is that it is still perceived as having a lingering authority about the reality it photographed. it's not purely about authenticity, but if you step over the line you lose that connection, and you are entering now the turbulent waters of "graphic design" more than keeping in your photography castle. yes, you both produce images, but the two are fundamentally different. you can sense when a photo has abandoned its roots and is now interpreting something else. of course, that's totally subjective, and not necessarily dependent on what tools were used, or what was added or subtracted, but it's there. you can't infinitely hide behind the presumption of interpretation to do whatever the hell you want while torturing a bunch of pixels, because they will haunt you back. authenticity is fragile. and often, manufactured. when someone tells me an image i posted looks very authentic, that means my manipulation game worked well, not that i didn't touch the image. they don't want true photos, because they don't communicate imagined reality well enough. they think they want them "as they are", but "as they are" comes with a litany of presuppositions about how they themselves remember reality that can't be matched by the cold reproduction of wavelengths that a camera sensor can do; and that's your primary material. the power you have there, when on your throne, looks intangible (no armies in sight) but is enormous. you decide what something was. and if people get on board with it, if it seduces them at a fundamental level, if they share you on the lie, it becomes what happened, it becomes what it was, it feels like you decided it would feel. that's your empire.

how could a photo reach its potential is an open question. do you want that day to feel like a bright memory, a lingering memory, have summer vibes, its people to look like they have a story, be iconic in an indirect way, the stage to be theatrical? who knows! the problem does not lie in "how" you exactly archive that, but it is essentially it, paradoxical as it might seem. there are so many tools at your disposal you can get lost in them, editing a photo in dozens of ways and not being able to tell what it really is. in fact, there are so many things to do that limitation is your best weapon. it's often quite arbitrary what set of things i will use given a particular session, but i try to limit myself to some, experiment gradually with new ones, and eventually choose one that just fits, but i only can know because i have played with it before.

about intent, sometimes i know in advance what i want a set of photos to be. those are easy. but more often than not, i don't know in advance. you play. sometimes i make sessions into chaos, using tons of different presets and approaches, sometimes i select one style and run with it through the whole folder, creating a homogeneous feeling. i don't have a sure formula. if we were to compare workflows with different photographers, i'm sure we could find some commonalities, but much of them will be incidental; most don't share a purpose behind the very articulated and very variable technical precision. to try to contain the combinatorial explosion of things you can make to a photo, and to try to guardrail myself and give ideas, i iterate over a large corpus of presets i have selected and made and curated over the years. they are not a sacred thing to live by, but i would recommend anyone to just download some massive repository of them and look at photos they have made through them, as often they will find ways to look at and interpret them in ways they didn't think of before. at least it's what happened to me. forget about the ones that just offer slight adjustments, go to town with them. push sliders to the limit, and then always adjust backwards. you can't find the limits of something until you cross the lines. eventually, what a photo wants to be, or what you want it to be, will reveal itself, but you have to be ready, and have done the work.

the product ends up being obviously a manufactured lie. because, i repeat, nobody cares about the truth. but you can aim to find an honest one. one that tells the viewer: "yes, this is false, but i don't only not try to hide it, i aim to present the underlying truth behind it". which is once again a soft version of "hiding behind impressionism", but at least there's some music in the background. going the other way is just using the supposed objectivity of the camera as an alibi.

regarding the viewer, people look at photos mainly through social media. so they need to pop and have certain dimensions and all that. but don't panic. it's not a compromise in your art form. well, it is. but it's nothing new. all art through history has been done in a format that would shape it. i choose to embrace it and don't think much about it, because to me, the photography itself is just a medium in the higher objective of communicating things. and so, inherent limitations (not only formatting and consumer preferences) are not absolute barriers to your sacred "fearless and boundless creativity", they are just that; often limitations are the best part. they can be limitations in software, hardware, on height, on what you're allowed to do in a studio... the world is full of them. embrace limitations. don't buy that optic you might need to do whatever. work with what you have and push its limits. only when you have explored them enough can you seek to be free from some of them.

and you can do all that myth making only by shooting and never edit. it's just tremendously hard.

the learning curve of editing is quite different from the one of taking photos. you learn to edit much faster and its effects are quite more noticeable. you only really get stuck when you do the same thing over and over, and even then, you will refine and work better and faster. optimizing workflows, and working faster (while keeping intent on what you do), is great because it lets you iterate way faster as well. while taking photos, once the moment is gone, the concert is over, the people have left, that's it. when editing, you live an eternal life. every moment is constantly and timelessly "there". you can do anything. and redo anything, and start over. a lifetime of opportunities without consequences. one such life should be lived with joy, not resignation. there will be concentrated sprints of outcome, and there will be freeform experimentation, all living inside your head while from the outside you're just a guy in front of a computer screen with no expression making small mouse movements and key presses. that's why different people seem suited best for this kind of work, and others for being in the wild taking the photos, but those two people have to converge into one. it's best when they do. they need one another, and to be that different and obsessed with photography in the same way. 

ruling makes emperors not only neurotic but directly paranoid. at a certain point, not caring too much is an asset. i used to spend a lot of time changing colors, and moving from colored to black and white to matte to tinted to effects and advanced editing back and forth. now i spend most of my time smoking cigarettes, looking at the pretty pictures and using the basic crop tool. there's an apparent regression imbued into good photography, one that seems to be present in lots of other artistic endeavours. a kind of earned effortlessness you can only reach by shooting and editing way too much so you can eventually go back again into doing too little, and achieving more. and then avoiding falling into newfound complacency, but that's another whole topic.

choice is your main weapon. it's all choices. what shots to take, where to stand. what shots to pick, what to do with them. what to post, in what order, what to hide. some people try to skip editing or taking photos or cheat their way into some of that. don't. decision fatigue is a thing, but you have to push through. don't make no-decisions. the images can feel that fear. editing is constraintless, so you risk producing nothing but indecision.

always edit with music. the monastic approach can be good for refinements. but if you see yourself lacking context and doing mechanical stuff where it should have "something", get imbued with music and paint it there somewhere. until it reaches a point you're convinced the photos can't be understood without the right tracks. in the end, it's not about what the photo shows. properly seen, a photo of something is just a photo of something. but the music. ah. you can't dodge that. every single tool and camera and shoes and anything you have at your disposal serves only and strictly only for the task of capturing lightning in a bottle. almost literally, it's called photography for a reason: you capture light. in isolation, the prosaic nature of any single tool should be self-evident to any gear-obsessed, workflow curator, soul-searching, instagrab-preset-seller, video-montage-maker, detail-focused, gallery-aficionado, family-snapshooter out there. whatever else what you do has and doesn't have, you put there at some point of the process. because without it, there's nothing there. don't you remember? there was nothing there to begin with.