Perfection

I started my photography business exclusively shooting medium-format film cameras. My workflow after a shoot was to bag and label all of my film rolls, carefully package them, and overnight ship my precious package to PhotoVision Prints in Salem, Oregon. 

Then… I would wait (no-so-patiently) for the magic to arrive in my inbox. The film rolls were developed and scanned by the best lab technicians in the world. They were carefully color corrected to my specifications and I had very, very little post-production to do once they downloaded to my computer. 

I rarely edited those files. Were the images perfect? No, some had soft focus. All of them had that dreamy film grain. Many had sun flare. But they were perfectly imperfect. I rarely edited the files because I wanted to show what was true. I wanted to tell the story of what I saw. I felt like the Lord’s creation was perfect as-is, and didn’t need to be digitally altered by me. 

When I added digital into my workflow I became a hybrid photographer trying to edit my digital images to emulate the film scans. On the digital images I began to feel a pressure to keep tweaking… keep editing… keep improving. I felt some stress about creating the *perfect* images. I would keep removing blemishes, keep cleaning up backgrounds, keep tweaking color profiles. Nothing felt good enough. When I opened an image in Photoshop I felt like I was in a black hole falling deeper and deeper.

My workflow eventually transferred to completely digital. And it is a constant battle to accept that imperfect is perfect. When I edit an image, I want to tell a story. A story that is human and real. While I find it acceptable to remove or manipulate images to better tell my story, I fight myself every day from trying to reach perfection. 

I’ll remove a distraction if I want the viewer’s eye somewhere else. But flyaway hairs are real. Scars are real. Texture and grain are real. Life isn’t perfect and just because you have the ability to alter the image, doesn’t mean you need to. And I’ve learned to improve many images in-camera as I take them (see Things I Wish I Learned Sooner: Part 1).

What I am sharing is my own personal guide to editing. I know there are photographers who create hyper-reality “fantasy” images with composites and extreme editing that are incredible works of art. I love and celebrate that! Their art is phenomenal. But for me, I don’t want fantasy. I don’t want perfect. I want to tell the story and tell the truth. With almost every picture I have to intentionally stop myself from retouching because the truth isn’t perfect.