Quietly the horizon begins to glow with the arrival of a new day. Bird chirping starts, awaken by the spreading light. The sun's rays just begin to crest, the clouds glow. Across the field a figure, a photographer, stands on an isolated rock. Closer we are, it appears he's not interested in shooting pictures. He's standing there making an announcment. What's he saying? We can't quite hear. Closer we get. The sun crests the distant mountains, Light dawns on the photographer. Finally we hear what he's been saying... yelling...

"...do not plan to fix it in Photoshop!"

Overly dramatic... I know, I'm making a point and being overly dramatic at the same time. I'm trying to set for you the perspective and knowledge of where that incredible, the most capable, complex, awesome digital tool--Photoshop--fits in the great scheme of photography things.

I'm a very strong believer getting it right in the camera is the highest bar any fine art photographer should aspire towards. I'm geting into the where's and whys in a moment but for now it shouldn't be a surprise to you. If you've read my other articles I routinely say the same thing, the most important ingredient of any fine art image is you the photographer. For this article, I'll take this a step further and say the moment of inspriation for an image is best captured the instant the camera's trigger is pulled.

Let's look at this statement. At any moment prior to trigger pull, the image doesn't exsist. Sure it may be there just waiting to be captured. But, since the tigger hasn't been pulled, the image hasn't obviously been captured. So what, you're saying to yourself. This concept is important because I'm focusing on when the "critical moment" occurs in image making. Before the image is captured, things are changing all the time. The light is adjusting, the subject is moving, the composition is transforming. Everything is alive. Only at the precise moment of trigger pull do you actually gain something permament. Before trigger squeeze the image through your view finder is like a breathing thing constantly on the move, ever chaning and morphing.

What about afterward? What about after the trigger pull? What's up with the image capture then? Well, all the emotion, the personal attention, the intangible ingredients of having you the human involved are only collected at that moment. In practical terms critical nuances change before and are frozen forever at the moment of trigger pull. This leads to the point of view you can't get more out of your image than what's really there.

Let's talk about image processing. Photographers have always been able to manipulate their images after capture. Through the chemical process we've been able to adjust our images to improve or change our prints. The skills and technology were dozens of years in the making. The best technicians of these chemical processes were artists in their own right. The master photographers, such as Ansel Adams, while well known as photographers were less widely acknowledged for their skills in the darkroom. What is less well known is their world famous prints would not have the killer qualities that made them famous without careful work in the darkroom. Rare is the image capture who's medium is so perfect that no post production is needed. Why am I bringing this up now? I'm telling you it's okay to "adjust" your images.

All the great master photographers "adjusted" their images to make truely memorable prints. But even before that, they all had a vision of what their prints would look like after everything was all said and done. Knowing precisely how their cameras and media would reproduce the scene, master photographers make careful adjustments through filtering, exposure control, and post processing to realize their vision.

Now, let's enter the digital photography world. Widely available digital imaging technology has changed everything. Where we used to depend on others to finish our imagery, we now accomplish with little effort in the comfort of our own homes. This immeidate flexibility allows photographers to manipulate their image captures in certain ways to realize their full potential. These adjustment are almost realtime. There's almost no waiting. The quality is so good and the process so easy that anyone can make these changes with confidence. With digital photography technology, photographers no longer have to write copious notes to their printers to fix slight imperfections of image captures. Photographers simply have to make the changes themselves on their computers and see the differences immediately. Wow, it appears we've reached some sort of total control nirvana--photographers are a total control freak kind of folk if you didn't know, oh by the way.

Like any new advance, this new total control is a double edged sword that can be used for good as well as bad. As they say in the movies "with great power comes great responsibility". A commonly I hear out in the field when conditions aren't quite right "...oh, we'll just fix it in Photoshop". From an integrated pure photographer's point of view, this is absolutely the worse thing one can hear. Photographers should not be planning to "fix it" in Photoshop. We should be getting it right in camera the best way we know how.

You're wondering, "how do I reconcile my statement that it's okay to adjust images yet I also say one should not be planning to "fix it" in Photoshop?" There's a clear difference. The most obvious is making adjustments as part of a larger plan to realize a specific vision is absolutely okay in my book. On the other hand, making adjustments for the sole reason of dealing with mistakes in the field is not the same as the first. Creating a vision and "fixing it" should be two entirely different things to photographers.