Findingviews

When you take a photograph, you are composing a view of a something. The moment the shutter releases a moment has been captured. Later if you edit or enhance that photograph you are composing it again. Do you crop, do you alter the importance or one thing over another? As the polish goes on the photograph changes from a composition of a moment to something else. That is where it all stops, your polished photograph is an interpretation of a moment.

What happens when time goes by even further?

Weeks, months or years later you take another look at the same photograph and say – I could do better. Now that time has past you are emotionally more distant from the moment and are viewing afresh with a different point perspective. If a reasonable amount of time has past you will probably have further developed your idea of style and will have new ideas on how an image should look. Applying your new viewpoint to an old image creates something new; another interpretation.

Is this valuable? – Well yes as something genuinely good and interesting can be the result.

Are there dangers? – Yes you are mashing up the past. Make sure you do not lose the old work. It is how you got to where you are today, it may still be valuable as an image. It will always be valuable as part of the record. In a digital world there is a danger that by continuously altering past work we lose past record and only have the moment.

The way I see it, digital recording gives us unlimited scope to edit. That’s unlimited scope to revise. We should do this if something good can be achieved, but we should be careful not to erase our pasts while we do this. Losing the past puts us into Big Brother territory were all we have are moments on a screen and very little else.

How did I arrive at these thoughts. I’ve recently updated a some of my earlier works. Here are the two latest examples.