102

The photo that wouldn't work.

It has such good bones. The dogs, the tongs, the outstretched arm, this composition has so much motion and depth. Why, oh why didn't I see the woman in the middle of the frame looking at the camera?

Once you see her, she can't be un-seen. Her direct gaze disrupts the circular flow of the photo. Stomps it almost out of existence. She draws and traps your attention like a black hole traps matter.

I tried all kinds of things to minimize her impact. Dodging her face (making it lighter in tone) to make it less distinct. Burning-in her face (making it darker) as if she were in shadow. Burning-in her glasses to hide her eyes. Nothing worked.

What about all my moralizing about not altering photographs? I consider tonal adjustments fair game especially in service of the legibility of elements in a photo. Cloning objects out of a photograph to improve composition is what gets my goat. I'm a product of my times having printed B&W photographs with an enlarger and wet chemistry in my youth. Now I digitally develop my images, but the Clone tool still seems like a recent and reckless innovation to me. (Reckless because of the quasi-objective nature of photography I've discussed elsewhere in these comments.)

Still, the dodging and burning described above cross my line, and this is why I can't include this photo in my portfolio.

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19.05