Often times when I am showing my work, people ask me how I create my images. In the past they were referring to what camera gear I use or how long I expose the film. However, in this digital age, what many people are really asking is what kinds of manipulation do I perform on my computer to “artificially” alter the colors, backgrounds, or textures of the scenes. The a priori judgment is that if you process images using a computer then you must be "faking" the images in some way.

When I encounter a work, I interact with it. I "appreciate" it. Part of my appreciation, particularly with natural scenes, comes from my belief that what I'm seeing actually exists. I can enjoy not only the beauty of the image itself, but I can also tap into the primordial sense of comfort, enjoyment, fear, or excitement  that nature variously stirs in a human soul.

To find out afterward that the mist filling that valley wasn't really there at all or that the bright red autumn foliage on that tree was actually dull brown or maybe that the tree wasn't even standing there, it was pasted in from some other shot and by the way so was that bird in the background. That's a shock. I feel that the artist has lied to me. The whole experience leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I take a conservative approach to my photography. I think that this is especially important since I claim to be a "nature photographer". I want to use my skills and techniques to illuminate the inherent beauty of nature; not overshadow it. I work for something more than mere documentation, but I know that I must work with my subject to gently draw out its essence rather than forcing my vision upon it.

I do as much upfront with the camera as I can rather than relying on software to do things on the backend. I like being in the woods and taking pictures not sitting in my office staring at a computer screen trying to "fix" a poorly taken image.

So I spend a lot of time fiddling with each shot - getting the right angle - shifting my position to get the scene from its "good side". I zoom in, zoom out, change lenses, speed up the shutter or slow it down, wait for the sun to come out from behind a cloud or maybe wait for it to go under. I use a polarizing filter to cut the glare off the surface of the water or maybe I remove the filter in order to capture the reflection of the blue sky. I don't use many of the whiz-bang features of my digital camera; I leave everything set to manual. I prefer to set my own aperture, shutter speed, and ISO and do my own focusing.

When I get home and start processing my images, I make gentle adjustments to exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, and shadows. I crop some images (although it pains me to lose pixels that way). I adjust the color balance only so far as to remove any tints applied by the camera when it incorrectly reads the temperature of the light.

I use a pretty low end image editing software package and I don’t even use a fraction of the features it provides. I never cut out blank grey skies and replace them with puffy white clouds. I never slice my images into layers, fiddle with the colors, and recombine them into “false color” images. I don’t combine elements from multiple photos. I don’t add textures or paint effects or fake mist. Once in a while I will convert an image to black and white.

Using a digital camera eliminates a lot of the dust spots and scratches that used to go along with film. Still, I drag my camera equipment through the woods for miles, up and down hills, through water, in all kinds of weather. Dust and dirt and water get all over it. This stuff always seems to show up on the images no matter how often I break out the cleaning papers. This is where the clone tool comes into play.

I use the clone tool sparingly. I remove spots and lines caused by crud on the optics of the camera. Sometimes there is the odd shiny spot on a wet rock or spots of bright light between tree branches that are distracting to the overall image – I’ll clone these out. On the other hand I have never found it useful to try and remove large objects like entire trees or tripod legs or power lines from my images. I just relegate those shots to the reject pile and vow to be more careful with my framing next time.

The final step is sharpening. I like nice sharp edges – no soft focus effects for me. My goal is to sharpen enough without going so far as to distort or degrade the image. This is always a tricky step.

That’s about it – nothing too fancy.

So if you look at some of my images and you think I must have artificially altered the colors or added textures or something, let me assure you that it ain’t so. Nature is just weird like that sometimes.

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