After finishing my comprehensive exams, I took a week off to decompress my brain and I spent a lot of time on photography—editing photos, taking photos, and listening to photography podcasts. One of those podcast episodes featured an interview with street photographer Valérie Jardin, and one comment of hers that stuck with me the most was her description of how she shoots. Now when it comes to editing photos, RAW files provide the most amount of flexibility—this is the data from your camera's sensor, and you decide how that data gets interpreted (in simplest terms, when you edit the photo and drag the sliders around, they can go a lot further before your image starts to look really weird. That dark shot in the bar can actually become usable).
This is not how Jardin photographs—instead, she shoots in JPG (the camera makes a lot of those decisions for you you can't really wind that stuff back [though in all honesty, your camera's probably doing a pretty good job anyway]), and she shoots in black and white. Her philosophy is that you should know whether the shot is going to be in color or black and white before you snap the photo.
This is a challenging notion for me to internalize because I admit that I do enjoy editing my photos after I've taken them. Just about every photo I post has been tweaked or fussed with in some way. Not in an egregious way—no missiles were photoshopped in the making of these photos. But I lift up the super dark parts of the photos so detail there is visible, I pull down blown out highlights, I increase or decrease the saturation or vibrancy of the image, I crop and adjust, I turn them into black and white after the fact.
So one of my photo projects during my break was to take that notion of shooting the photo and letting it be and applying it. I did this a few times before—in 2016, shortly after I got my Ricoh GR II), I took a bunch of shots around New York using my camera's built-in high contrast black and white JPG mode. After listening to the interview, I went back and looked at those shots, and I confess I felt pretty happy with how they turned out. After all, here's a bearded guy in sunglasses crossing Lexington Avenue on a scooter and he seems to be having an awesome time.
I do not live in New York anymore, so I couldn't repeat this exercise in quite the same way. But I also stepped back for a second and wondered—well why haven't I at least tried? In moving to central Pennsylvania, I knew that life here was going to be much different, and I kinda think I had over-absorbed that into what I'd decided to photograph.
So aside from the low-hanging fruit of photo subjects on a large college campus—nice trees, grassy quads, and distinguished-looking buildings—I have focused on those things that look like the most obvious subjects for this rural (and quite scenic) region: nature paths and forests from our walks (per COVID-19 world, we took a lot more walks last year).
But the thought never occurred to me to go downtown just to take photos.
So, among the luxuries I gave myself during my week off, was spending an hour on Thursday morning taking shots around downtown State College. I had a lot of fun, and I did enjoy once again the constraints of shooting a photos whose characteristics had already been largely predetermined: lots of contrast, heavy vignettes, and not much to be done in editing. There are fewer ways to tweak, fuss, and adjust when those characteristics have been baked into the image file. I still edited things—here and there doing a small crop and using the clone stamp to patch over those parts of the frame marred with sensor dust…
but otherwise I've tried to leave these as they were and let go for a bit, which is, after all, the whole point of taking some time off.
