The other day I went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Shamefully this is the first time I’ve been there since going digital which is what made the visit so interesting. I always say to people if you want to learn about lighting visit an art gallery because all our photographic lighting comes from painting. Photographers even refer to Rembrandt lighting.

I was there with my assistant and we were being silly and pixel peeping. In other words just looking at pure technique and skill. It is an occupational hazard with photographers probably born out of insecurity that we look at other photographs at the microscopic level in order to, most likely, find fault with something that has no bearing at all on the image or has any impact on a non photographic viewer. Looking in this way made me realise a few things. One is that painters don’t do shallow focus in the way that photographers and cinematographers do. Everything is sharp front to back mostly. if it is soft it seems to be as a result of emphasis rather than a deliberate device to render something out of focus meaning the dress is more important than the dog so the dog gets less work than the dress. What this means is we get a very “present” image that stands out but is not a function of shallow focus. Our eyes don’t see with shallow focus. It’s only when we scan a photograph taken with that technique that we see it. To see it in real life we would have to build blurred tables to put in front of the television we are watching!

The other thing I noticed was the painting equivalent of over sharpening. The eyes on one painting were given so much emphasis that if the same were done in a photograph it would be rejected and laughed at. It was fascinating to look at the art with a new viewpoint and gave me a much greater understanding of the various techniques and quality of painting that was on show.

I think I can actually thank Photoshop for making me see things differently. My retouching barely has to extend beyond basic cloning and colour correction but occasionally I have to draw things in or put drinks in a glass and you are forced to confront how real you can make something look. It is pretty easy to tell when you have got it right but can be impossible to get it right in the first place. So Photoshop has refined my ability to draw and also my ability to see.

Below are examples of an image that had a drink put in a formerly empty glass and an image with shallow focus.

© Patrick Baldwin 2009. All rights reserved. Anthony Dowson and Daria Klimentova in English National Ballet's production of Manon.

© Patrick Baldwin 2008. All rights reserved. Central School of Speech and Drama. The Women.

After thinking about all this while looking at very representational art I then turned round and saw a wall full of Turners which were entirely blurred! But what great art.

Magenta Aint A Colour. As pretentious photographers we will say anything to avoid saying the word purple and choose to use the word magenta so as to appear sophisticated. Similarly we never say “out of focus” when we can say “a little soft”. This clearly speaks to our deepest insecurities. According to the link above the colour magenta doesn’t exist! It’s a construct of our mind to bridge the gap between red and violet because magenta doesn’t have a wavelength assigned to it.

So…if it doesn’t exist does that mean that photographers are not pretentious after all?

Thanks to The British Journal of Photography for bringing this up.