Joshua Cripps’ Photo Blog

Is nature photography an art form? If you asked that question among the photographic community, I believe you’d get an unequivocal “YES!” as an answer. That nature photography is a form of art is something the I and many other photographers believe fully. But what if you asked that question among the general public? Or more importantly, among brand new, aspiring photographers? What would they say?

I’ve been asked multiple times if what I do is art, the question usually flowing to the tune of something like: “You take pictures of something pretty that’s already there. How is that art?” A logical offshoot of this is: “In fact, if all you’re doing is creating a copy of something pretty and calling that art, isn’t the original landscape a piece of art as well?”

I’ve actually written about this at length before in this essay, so I’ll keep my comments brief for now. Suffice it to say that every beautiful place affects each of us in some way and instills in us some emotion, whether it be awe, admiration, wistfulness, or happiness. And every time some one takes a photo of one of these beautiful places, he is trying to capture some of the emotions he felt in being there. But how many times have you seen a photo of a place and heard the photographer tell you: “If only you’d been there! If only you could’ve seen it with your own eyes. Then you would’ve felt what I felt!” So what happened to all that emotion and feeling? Where did it go and why is it lost from these photographs?

That’s where art comes in. A piece of art is able to convey emotion and feeling. And more than that, true art is able to convey the exact emotions and feelings that the artist intended. A beautiful landscape itself may convey many emotions to many people, but in a piece of art, an artist is able to show one thing to everyone, to convey a specific meaning and significance that might otherwise have not been noticed (this is why the natural world is not art in and of itself: it is not a conscious attempt to convey specific thoughts, feelings, and emotions). And this is the difference between just a photo and a piece of art: a simple photo might show you what a place looks like, but a piece of photographic art will show why that place is meaningful, and will leave the viewer charged with the emotion of the place.

This is why nature photography is most certainly an art form. A good nature photograph has the power to stop us in our tracks, to drop our jaws, and to leave us feeling amazed at the beauty in the world. But the ability of nature photography to do this doesn’t just come from pointing a camera at something pretty and pressing the shutter. It comes from an artist’s careful consideration of a scene, from experience, technical know-how, and aesthetic sensibilities.

The reason I specifically singled out new, aspiring photographers in the first paragraph of this essay is that they need to understand that producing art is all about making creative decisions. As I mentioned above, a beautiful landscape might affect us all in a slightly different way. In order to produce a piece of art, an artist must first understand how the landscape is affecting him. Armed with that knowledge, he can begin to make creative decisions about how to capture a scene in order to convey the emotions he wants to convey.

Naturally those creative decisions manifest themselves in the way we set up our cameras: aperture, shutter speed, ISO, composition, and so on. These are the landscape photographer’s tools in creating a piece of art and will be the subject of many follow-up posts.

Earlier today I showed a friend of mine my most recent photo, taken at sunset at a place called Abalone Cove. Here’s the photo:

Now, my friend has been to this place before, and the first words out of his mouth were: “That’s not what it looks like.” In good fun, he also made some comments about me creating a “fake world” by blurring the water and the clouds. I gotta say, this irked me a little bit, but at the time I couldn’t think of how to respond to such a flat statement, so I didn’t say much of anything.

But his words weighed on me over the evening and made ponder exactly what I capture as a photographer. The knee-jerk idea that immediately comes to mind is that I strive to capture a moment in time, the “true feeling” of a given instant. But now I’m struggling with that statement because I think it’s hard to define exactly what it means. Delving slightly into the semantics of it, I’m first forced to wonder exactly what an “instant” really is and how the idea of an instant relates to what a camera is actually capable of capturing.

Looking at the technical side of things, what happens when you press the shutter button on a camera is that a sensor (I shoot digital) records all the photons that hit it as long as the shutter is open. So lets say that I’m shooting hummingbirds and I want to freeze the motion of a bird’s wings in midair; I’m going to set my camera up to have as quick of a shutter speed as possible, hopefully something in the 1/4000 sec range. That means the camera’s sensor is going to record all the photons that hit it during a length of time which is equal to 1/4000 sec: a fraction of a second, in all meanings of the term. Now let’s say I’m planning on shooting a meadow on a bright but cloudy day; I’m going to stop down my aperture for maximum depth of field with the result that my shutter speed might slow down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/100 sec; still a fraction of a second by most people’s reckoning. Both of these shots capture what is arguably an instant’s worth of time, and yet the second shot was 40 times slower than the first! In the time span of the second shot, I could theoretically have captured 40 images of the hummingbird. Does that mean the second shot wasn’t a single instant, but rather 40 instants strung together? In my mind, it’s still a single instant, because what is the difference between the two? In both cases, the sensor is recording photons for a given length of time; the second just happens to be arbitrarily longer than the first.

But hold on then; what if we draw this out farther along the same logical lines? If a factor of 40 increase in shutter speed doesn’t destroy the meaning of an instant, what about another 50-fold increase? Now we’re at a shutter speed of 1/2 sec. Are we starting to lose the meaning of the word instant? Starting to get a little hazier, methinks. What if we go out another 500 times to an exposure of just over four minutes? I think most people would agree that four minutes is hardly “an instant,” but where does the dividing line go up between “instant” and “non-instant”? When I look at things like this, I’m forced to say that I can’t arbitrarily create a point where shutter speeds faster than X capture an instant, and shutter speeds slower than X don’t capture an instant.

Which means I have to look elsewhere for the definition of the word “instant” as it relates to photography, and especially to my field landscape photography. The obvious thing which comes to my mind is feeling. Throughout the day, the feeling, tones, and mood of any given scene change due to variations of the light illuminating that scene. And that’s really what any photographer is trying capture (whether he knows it or not): the feeling of a certain place while he was there in person, experiencing it. So doesn’t that really help us define what an instant is? Let me give it a shot: an instant is a duration, during which the feelings, mood, and emotions of a scene don’t change. Whether that be 1/4000 sec or 4 mins, each shutter speed is designed to capture the individual feeling of that specific length of time, that instant. If the feel of a place doesn’t change over a period of time, who cares if that time is short or long? I’m forced to the conclusion that both can be “instants.”

Something else my friend’s comment made me think of is the purpose of art. I’m sure I could wax philosophically about that subject for posts on end, but I’ll sum up my views on the subject as briefly as I can. In my opinion, the point of art is to show us the world around ourselves, but not just in a way that we recognize it as the world. Art should peel back the layers so that we see or feel something new about the world. We should walk away from a piece of art slightly different people than we were when we walked toward it, having learned something, or seen some hidden truth about the world.

And I feel that in that respect, landscape photography is no different from any other art. Granted that landscape photography is in general a very true-to-life kind of art, but that doesn’t mean that it should mimic the real world as closely as possible. If that were the case, the robotic camera on top of the Google StreetView car would be creating masterpieces every day. But it isn’t, and that’s because art requires an artist to make creative decisions about how to interpret the world in a way that brings something new to the table, even if that something new is simply the beauty and wonder of a given place.

For the photo above, it wasn’t taken by a robot whose job was to obtain an image which mirrored real life as closely as possible. It was taken by me after I made specific creative decisions about how to interpret the beauty and emotion of Abalone Cove. And to be completely honest, this final image doesn’t bear a remarkable resemblance to any frozen moment in time at the cove that evening. If that were the case, I should have captured a massive wave crashing on the rocks in front of me and sending spray high into the air. And while a photo like that might better have conveyed the drama of the sea that night, it wouldn’t get across the point that I wanted to make about the motion of the sea and the clouds, the swirling whites of the water, the almost-surrealism of the constant swells and gushes of water on the rocks. And in truth, I also really wanted to see what would come out after a very long exposure. But regardless of the actual choices I made and the reasons behind them, my point remains the same: I interpreted this place and its emotions and made the artistic choices I felt necessary to convey those feelings in an image.

Taking this back to my friend, now I know I’ve got a much better reply if he ever says “that’s not how it looks” to me again: Am I simply trying to capture how a place looks at a moment frozen in time? Absolutely not, because the wonder and beauty and feeling of a place is contained in so much more than just the way it looks. Rather I’m trying to capture how a place feels in the instant that it feels that way, to capture my emotions in a way that relates to the beauty of the scene, and to use my camera as an interpretive tool to convey those feelings to a greater audience. I think that rather than create “fake worlds,” as my friend suggested, I’m really trying to reveal the hidden truths.