VIVID OR LIVID?

Dick Pountain/16 April 2007/14:31/Idealog 153

It's almost exactly a year ago that I confessed my addiction to Flickr in this column, and I still haven't found a way to break the habit. I have a lot more pictures up there now, a Pro account with lots more sets, far more contacts, and the same pathetic craving for views and favourites that keeps me going back for more.  A year's nowhere near long enough to view all of Flickr's massive content and I still come across new groups I want to join weekly. What I have learned in a year though are three lessons:
a) The technical standard of photography on Flickr is awe-inspiringly, intimidatingly high
b) However, it's high within a certain rather narrow aesthetic
c) I'm perhaps too old to be really comfortable with that aesthetic

It's hardly surprising that many photographs on Flickr look stunning because modern digital cameras are so powerful they make it hard to take a badly-exposed or out-of-focus shot, which is not to meant to detract from the marvellous eye for unusual subjects and angles that many Flickrers display. The thing is, there's a distinct Flickr "look" which I'd sum up as almost hyper-real due to enhanced sharpness and colour saturation. One reason for this is that pictures need to look stunning at size of a Flickr thumbnail if they're to attract views, but I believe it's also a preference. It's a very familiar look because it's also the look of glossy car adverts, fashion shots, and of many movies nowadays. (There are groups who indulge in blurred pictures, or in black-and-white, but it's their very minority status that provides their raison d'etre).

I learned to take pictures back in the 1960s using black-and-white film in a Pentax Spotmatic. Our idols were Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and the new generation of David Bailey and Don McCullen. Our subjects were grittily realistic. The dominant aesthetic became very hard, pushing Tri-X film to ASA800 and printing on high contrast papers. Sharpness wasn't particularly valued - soft focus, motion blur, all added to the spontaneity of the pic. At some unconscious level we thought that such pictures accurately reflected the dirty, turbulent world we lived in. That was of course nonsense, just as it would be nonsense to say that the razor-sharp, glowing colours of Flickr pix accurately reflect a clean, bright world we live in today. The camera is every bit as "subjective" as human perception is, and the way your pictures look is a choice, not a reflection of reality. I could have printed my pictures on soft paper with lots of gray scale, but I didn't want to. Pictures actually represent far more what you're hoping for than what you actually saw.

This is even truer now that digital photography offers the potential to sever almost all connection to the original subject. By shooting in RAW mode you can simply capture all the luminosity information in a scene and then in effect "re-shoot" the picture later on your PC any way you want. And once the information is on your PC, you can spice it up in all kinds of ways. I recently came across Google's excellent Picasa photoviewing software which not only organises all the pictures on your hard disk very well, but lets you enhance them in a particularly simple and intuitive fashion - and guess what, if you use the "I'm Feelng Lucky" button it often automatically produces the Flickr look.

For serious fiddlers though Picasa has nowhere near enough firepower: you need Photoshop, or in my case Jasc's Paintshop Pro to which I've been faithful since version 1. One of the fastest growing sports on Flickr is HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography, which can produce images that go beyond the hyper-real and into the hallucinatory. An HDR picture combines several different frames of the same subject with different exposures, so that every pixel gets optimised to a perfection that neither the camera nor the human eye could ever achieve unaided. The results are occasionally amazing and transcendental, sometimes vulgar, but eventually just as predictable as any other pictures. Another popular technique is "Ortonising" (named after its inventor), which combines the same picture just twice - one version Gaussian-blurred and overexposed - to create a strange glowing softness that can be very attractive on some scenes, but looks like Early '70s Californian Porn if you're not careful.

I've had enormous fun experimenting with such tricks and have started to adapt them to my own tastes, which veer toward Man Ray surrealism rather than the sharp-and-glossy. Full-scale HDR employs special software like Photomatix and even special lenses, but I just use the same picture processed various different ways and recombined using the whole spectrum of Paintshop's blend modes. I search out those pictures that have something I like in their subject matter or composition but that weren't sharp or well-exposed enough for public consumption. I'll mangle them over and over, adding layer after layer, trying different masks and blend modes until something emerges that strikes my eye - more often than not it doesn't and I just dump the mess without saving. And I deliberately *don't* note the steps I took, so when something I like does emerge it's a one-off creation, not a potential rut.