Im trapped on an airline traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago in one of those sell every seat to make a penny flights. Add on the nice feature of being assigned a middle seat in a row way to the back of the aircraft you have the makings of an incredible time. After napping for an hour to make up for the four AM wakeup this morning I get to reviewing my latest creation, a catalog of Best of 1999 & 2000 images. The wonderful woman sitting next to me wonders about what Im reviewing. I think shes not totally convinced the images of this Best Of catalog are all mine. As she peruses through the catalog with a common theme are those images filtered? Incredulously she listens to my statement, thats as is, straight out of the camera. Shes totally unconvinced.

A common problem any photographer has clusters about the integrity of his imagery. With the advent of digital technology and the relative ease it is for the most uneducated to tweak an image, theres an assault on the honesty of what the viewer sees and believes. The most basic example is of photographers using the saturation tool in Photoshop to punch up the image. Its a simple and easy method to give that image its zing without really changing too much of anything else. Are there any problems with that? Does the photographer have a problem if he subtly applies a little enhancement here or there? I think he does whether he believes it or not. This is especially true if his art is intended to be viewed as being natural without regard to how the image was intended when the shutter was fired.

Almost every time Ive shown imagery of amazing sunrises or sunsets, the common question becomes is that color natural? It sure is but Ive fallen short in explaining in simple terms of why what I see is different than what they see/record with their little point and shoots. We as photographers have a credibility problem when we cant use simple explanations about the most common of issues.

From a technical point of view, keeping true color is a significant challenge. Lots of science and high order math is combined with super-fast computing power to keep colors looking honest. Even then, the colors arent really accurate but just in the eye of the beholder. Lets look at the problem. First, pretend youre shooting an object in medium light with a digital camera. At the time of capture, the subject is transposed to ones and zeros in the digital camera. How the camera sees the scene is totally independent of how you may have viewed it. The silicon receptors are simply different than the rods and cones of your eyes which cause minor variations of the tonal qualities of the image. To keep things more accurate methods have been devised to map the colors of the subject with reference called a colorspace to ensure a common standard gets recorded in the digital camera at the time of capture along with the image.

The next challenge occurs when you open the image on your computer. The image that was carefully mapped by your camera to the reference colorspace has to have the same process applied when opened on your computer. We have monitors that see colors differently than your eyes or even your camera. A bit of translating of the digital file to ensure what you see looks something like what you saw when the image was captured is required. Similarly to when the image was captured, the digital image file gets translated when its opened to make sure it appears as close as possible to what your eyes saw when the scene was captured. Is this process perfect? No, far from it. Your eye, digital camera, and monitor see differing amounts of colors and none are equal. The reality is some colors are truncated in the digital process which causes what you see on your monitor is something that in reality is something less than what you saw with your own naked eye when the image was captured.

Add the next dimension and another step in the process, printing. Now we have more of the same problems of converting what you see on screen to what you see on your print. Another bit of digital magic, more color translation, and even more color truncations, you have the extreme potential that your printed file will look totally different than what you saw out in the field. Whats a fine are photographer supposed to do when hes desiring to ensure the integrity of his imagery? Good question.

This is where the integrity part comes in which is a human intervention. With all these technical challenges, its next to impossible to technically ensure colors maintain exactly to what you saw out in the field. The easiest and probably best way to keep the human element in your art is developing your vision and anticipating at image capture what you want the scene to look like when its finally printed. Ansel Adams was very big in this process. His zone system was totally about using a finely honed eye to modified the image at capture, during development, and when printing to realize the creation of his vision at shutter firing. His techniques arent outdated with todays instant gratification of the color digital world. Its just as required. I figure if youre honest with your art by making prints that match your vision, no one can fault you with your methods, integrity is maintained.