Image quality and street photography

[Juan Valdenebro]

I try to have exposure resolved in advance... If I'm shooting stopped down and prefocused, then it's easy, but if I'm doing selective close focusing at 1.4, being people my subject, those are the harder shots for several reasons...

Cheers,

Juan

 

[Spyro]

For one I'm against blocked shadows and blown highlights in a photograph of any kind. the shadows should never be absolutly black, meaning lacking any detail whatsoever and the highlights should never be completely white.

I take it you didn't like dream/life very much eh? 🙂

 

[NickTrop]

Least important.

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

Least important.

^ +1.

That should be clear to anyone doing street photography. Cool, Nick!

Cheers,

Juan

 

[nightfly]

Depends what you mean by quality.

I think you are talking about things like sharpness, blur, focus etc and are preferring shaper, in focus, non-grainy to their opposites.

However street photography tends to be more expressive than say documentary photography although they are often similiar from a subject matter point of view and some of the street photos I tend to like, Daido Moriyama comes to mind, would be criticized for things like blur, grain, blocked shadows, blown out highlights etc. See New York 1971 for blown out grainy photos taken with a half frame camera.

However I would consider these qualities essential to his vision and art or if not essential at least very much part of his work.

That doesn't mean however that blown out grainy photos are good for everyone.

 

[semilog]

For one I'm against blocked shadows and blown highlights in a photograph of any kind. the shadows should never be absolutly black, meaning lacking any detail whatsoever and the highlights should never be completely white.

The fact is that many of the most important photos in the history of our medium have blown highs or blocked shadows, and in many cases this was quite intentional on the part of the artists.

Such rules would never be imposed in (modern) painting or drawing or printmaking or any other 2-D visual art. To say that such an orthodoxy should be imposed on photographic processes is an arbitrary conceit.

It's one thing to say that a good photographer should be able to make a photograph with a wide tonal scale. It's quite another to say that she should always do so.

 

[semilog]

I feel photography, especially street photography should not deviate from the down-to-earth and gritty quality of the street reality. Street reality in my view is the life as it happens on the street. In other words, people don't walk on the street transformed into blurs and the sky is never completely white and the shadows are never completely black.

And people are not monochromatic and water fountains never appear to our eyes as they do when photographed at 1/500 of a second...

Clearly, 3-D color HD video (with Smell-O-Vision) is the only valid medium for capturing street life.

(We won't even get into the actual DOF of the human eye under different lighting conditions m'kay?)

 

[bensyverson]

(We won't even get into the actual DOF of the human eye under different lighting conditions m'kay?)

One of the fascinating things about the eye is that the user has the impression of full HDR and infinite DOF, but that is effectively post processing by the brain. The eye is changing focus constantly, the iris is adjusting, and the brain is stitching it together on the fly.

I remember when I told my fiancé about how vision turns monochromatic below certain light levels. When she experienced it, she was astonished that she hadn't noticed something so simple before. Her brain hadn't bothered to tell her she was seeing in black and white.

All photography is a lie; even the photography of your own eyes.

 

[semilog]

One of the fascinating things about the eye is that the user has the impression of full HDR and infinite DOF, but that is effectively post processing by the brain. The eye is changing focus constantly, the iris is adjusting, and the brain is stitching it together on the fly.

I remember when I told my fiancé about how vision turns monochromatic below certain light levels. When she experienced it, she was astonished that she hadn't noticed something so simple before. Her brain hadn't bothered to tell her she was seeing in black and white.

All photography is a lie; even the photography of your own eyes.

I teach biological science for a living. That was very nicely put. 😎

 

[Steve M.]

There are obviously two sides to this.

A - if the scene you shoot is really outstanding, a Holga will probably do the trick.

B - there will eventually be an opportunity to shoot a great scene, and all you'll have is a Holga. For the rest of your life you'll wish you had brought the Leica/Rolleiflex/Hasselblad etc.

So just in case, bring the good camera. Because you never know.

 

[Alpacaman]

There seems to be a trend of saying IQ is not important - it is the subject that matters. Only half of that sentence is true, however. They are both important, neither one more so than the other.

A great subject is not so great if it is completely obscured by other elements of the image, be it grain, blocked shadows, blown highlights or focus way off some other place. If it is not obscured, fine, all is well. I am not saying an image must not have blocked shadows etc. I am simply saying that they can be detrimental.

Sure, you can say a technically perfect photo (Does it exist? No. Lets be hypothetical) of something boring is worse than a slightly blurry photo of something great, but that is hardly a fair comparison. A technically perfect photo of something utterly boring vs. a unidentifiable black blob, is a more fair comparison.

As in all things, there is a middle way, and neither side of the middle is better than the other. Street photographers generally sit on the subject side, and landscape photographers sit on the technical side. Who can deny that both camps produce stunning material routinely?

As for seeing reality as properly as possible? Well, whose reality are we talking about here?

 

[Spyro]

Daido Moriyama is known to shoot wide deliberately and then crop aggressively to emphasize the grain 🙂

 

[Juan Valdenebro]

There seems to be a trend of saying IQ is not important - it is the subject that matters. Only half of that sentence is true, however. They are both important, neither one more so than the other.

Hi Alpacaman,

One of them (content) is A LOT more important than the other one...

And one of them (IQ) can vary in some degree without affecting the image and its photographic value...

I think you're mixing two concepts: one thing is that they both live together on an image, but another thing is which of them serves the other one...

Not even on landscape IQ is important: detail can help only there: to show detail, but what makes a landscape beautiful is not IQ, but light and composition... So even on landscape content is A LOT more important than IQ.

Want a proof?

Sharpen a bit a not too focused Frank image, and blur a bit a sharp Adams image, and print them both: they will be just the same photographs... But imagine changing their content or composition or light or precise instant, and they will be TOTALLY gone...

Cheers,

Juan

 

[maddoc]

Daido Moriyama is known to shoot wide deliberately and then crop aggressively to emphasize the grain 🙂

Huh ? 😕

 

[jsrockit]

Huh ? 😕

😉

"As most photographers know, the cropping of a raw image is a key to a successful photo. Moriyama is no different. As an example, he points at a slightly tilted photo in the Moriyama-Shinjuku-Araki exhibition book of the bottom half of a pair of female legs walking away from the camera. Moriyama explains that by just showing the area between her black skirt and high heels the image is more effective in that it forces the viewer to use his imagination."

http://www.bigempire.com/sake/daido_moriyama.html

 

[bigeye]

There is a shot or there isn't. Least.

 

[kevinparis]

Hi Alpacaman,

One of them (content) is A LOT more important than the other one...

And one of them (IQ) can vary in some degree without affecting the image and its photographic value...

I think you're mixing two concepts: one thing is that they both live together on an image, but another thing is which of them serves the other one...

Not even on landscape IQ is important: detail can help only there: to show detail, but what makes a landscape beautiful is not IQ, but light and composition... So even on landscape content is A LOT more important than IQ.

Want a proof?

Sharpen a bit a not too focused Frank image, and blur a bit a sharp Adams image, and print them both: they will be just the same photographs... But imagine changing their content or composition or light or precise instant, and they will be TOTALLY gone...

Cheers,

Juan

agreed - good way of articulating the priorities in an image as far as I am concerned

 

[ebino]

I take it you didn't like dream/life very much eh? 🙂

I used to really like Trent Park's work three years ago. It was b&w on steroids. but now to me they feel over-cooked, and their impact has diminished considerably.

On the other hand Winogrand's work did not do anything for me three years ago. now i look at his photos with great admiration...

 

[Alpacaman]

Sharpen a bit a not too focused Frank image, and blur a bit a sharp Adams image, and print them both: they will be just the same photographs... But imagine changing their content or composition or light or precise instant, and they will be TOTALLY gone...

If you made an Adams picture exceptionally grainy, or changed the tonal range, doesn't it also represent a different moment then? Giving a Frank image perfect focus also adds a feeling of clarity to the moment, that we did not have before, so it is now a different moment shown.

The nature of the image quality is what gives us a perception of these moments. All photography is simply a rough articulation of a moment - in which the nature of an image as well as content are used to make an approximation of a nonexistent past.

They both rely on each other to make a good photo, but they are both immune to any sort of metric. Image quality and content are both highly subjective - some people say grain takes away from IQ, I would argue that it can add, it is all situational. IQ and content are interdependent - is there a point where IQ stops and content begins? Does excessive grain become content? Is blurriness content? Could be. It depends on who you are and how you look at these things. I would not know where to draw the line where one begins and the other finishes - any line that is drawn is only a perception of some qualities of a 2D representation of something else. And so, I do not think there is any separation of the two.

This being the case, at least to me, they are both the same creature. Importance of one part over another is entirely personal opinion, based on how you yourself interpret a photo. So, everyone is going to have a different idea of importance of these aspects of an image, and they are all correct in their own realities.

Objectively, it is impossible to say, so I am settling with neither one being more important than the other.

 

[Lss]

Image quality is important, but I much rather use a camera I like and can get the shot I want with than one that exhibits lower noise level at high ISOs.