Call & Response

The First Response: Straight Out of the Camera JPEG — Jessica

I agree 95% with what Cheryl wrote. But I feel very strongly about that remaining 5%. Let me explain.

I came to photography through Photoshop. I got my first copy of Photoshop back in 1994, using it to create backgrounds for Macromedia Director animation (the precursor to Flash). So, for me, part of the joy of photography has always been in the manipulation. That is something that the film I shot wasn’t able to give me. Maybe if I had had a darkroom or classes in photography while in school I would have felt differently. But shooting a roll of film (while not taking careful notes about exposure) and dropping it off a Costco or even the local photo lab was too much of a black box for me. The photos mysteriously came back and sometimes looked good and sometimes didn’t. It made for a very steep learning curve.

Shooting JPEG and posting SOOC is very much like that black box. It is taking away the control that you (as the artist) have over the image (and the intent) and giving it to the computer. A JPEG is not SOOC. It is allowing the camera to make the saturation, contrast and sharpening choices for you.

Now there isn’t anything wrong with that but if you are trying to share a vision then allowing the camera to make those choices isn’t necessarily helping you to achieve your goal.

I shoot RAW and generally make only minimal changes. I do believe that you need to get the best possible image in-camera. But I want to control those final variable so that the image I present matches the one in my head — not the one that the camera’s computer algorithm thought was “average” for that scene. But those changes: cropping, white balance, contrast, highlight recovery, mid-tone contrast, noise reduction, saturation/desaturation are what moves the image along toward my vision.

And those changes are no different than what I would have been able to do in the film world with a combination of film stock, paper stock and developing chemicals, if I had had the resources and skills. So to me, even film was never really SOOC, either.

So, that SOOC image up there? It is a JPEG and I have my camera set to all neutral settings and it looks pretty good. This matches so much closer what I had in my head at the time: