If Ansel Adams had Photoshop

Everybody these days knows about Photoshop. In some circles it’s become synonymous with falsity and deception. It can apparently create an alternative reality and change history and is one of the terrors of the modern world. But there are a couple of things to me at least, missing from that view. It’s not the Fifth horseman of the Apocalypse by any means. Let’s consider a couple of positives….

Firstly, very few of the images that grace magazines, webpages and yes, gallery walls have not been altered in some way after the point where the original image hit the back of the camera. Why is that? Well, I would argue that at least in some respects what the photographer is trying to do when he uses Photoshop is move the image closer to what he saw in his mind’s eye when he took the picture in the first place.

When I bought my first SLR camera I lived in Cardiff. I remember racing out of my flat to shoot the first roll of film on a nearby meadow where some horses grazed (I know… Cardiff was a different place in 1981). I shot a roll of film in overcast conditions and then got the ruinously expensive 2 hour developing option in Boots. The pictures when I picked them up were a hammer blow…. They were blurry, boring, flat. They were more ‘muddy’ than ‘moody’. That was what I had seen when I looked through the viewfinder. Had I had Photoshop 40 years ago I might have been able to salvage something. I could have sharpened them, maybe darkened them down and even tried monochrome. It was probably only that I had spent over a hundred pounds (!) on a camera and lens that made me persevere at all.

The other thing to say though is that the skills of the professional photographer have always included a strong element of post-production jiggery-pokery. From Ansel Adams to Terence Donovan, photographers have manipulated images to get closer to what they had in mind when the picture was taken. All that’s happened is that the tools today are better.

Which doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t occasions when a picture isn’t photoshopped to death…. Follow enough people on Instagram and your eyes eventually bleed from the horrors visited on nondescript pictures, tarted up beyond any sense.

As with many things, knowing when to stop is probably the key. Anyway, thankfully and sensibly I didn't keep those first efforts, though I still have the image I was after.... it came from the inside cover of Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother" - Good eh?