[Note: The Online Photographer's M.C., majordomo, and Chief Bottlewasher, Mike J., just had his eye operated on and is recuperating. Big rule during recovery: no screens, no reading, lie flat and stare at the ceiling. He got an Echo and is listening to Audible books! Meanwhile, for your amusement and reflection, a few blasts from the past. One will be published every day while Mike's away.]
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[The other day], a number of people chose to assume that I was talking about conventional "image quality." I wasn't. I was talking about "the results you want." That could be anything.
I don't care about "image quality," anyway. I care more about image properties.
What does that mean?
When it comes to photographs, a "property" is what I call "quality" without the value judgment attached. And with a much broader range of possibilities.
Grainlessness might be an aspect of image quality. To me it's just a property—as is extreme graininess. Or anything in between. Accurate color might be another aspect of conventional "image quality." That's a property too—as is deliberately or adventitiously inaccurate color. And so on.
People suffer from very oppressive ideas about which properties of images are "good." Certain properties are said to be "good" and their absence "bad." I choose not to submit to that oppression. Shake loose your shackles, your bonds and fetters! Free yourself!
Ahem.
But really, photographers talking about "image quality" are like pious people talking about moral virtue. Certain image qualities have to be "good." Lack of those "good" qualities is a shortcoming...a failure...a sin. "Bad."
Sharpness is the most highly prized, the most widely accepted, image virtue. But who says an image has to be sharp? Some are, some aren't. Some sharp images look like crap and some sharp images look great. Unsharp images, ditto—sometimes that can look good, sometimes not. It depends.
Sharpness is a property that suits some pictures and not others. Some photographers treat it like a virtue, as if possessing more of it confers ever more glory and honor upon them.
They're wrong about that. What, you can't imagine a thoroughly bad photograph that's extremely sharp? Never seen one? I've seen thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions, even.
Consider that during the time of the pictorialist movement—and among the amateurs that kept its values alive in its aftermath—the same assumption held sway, except in the reverse. Image unsharpness was the virtue, the accepted convention.
I used to see a fair number of pictures that were ruined because they weren't sharp enough. Those days are mostly gone. Even modest cameras and lenses can take pictures that are plenty sharp these days.
Granted, it's somewhat more difficult to make a photograph work when it suffers from unvirtuous properties—you have to be sensitive to the effect those properties have, the way they function visually, and how well they suit a particular picture and its message, instead of being just plain clueless about all those things. And in order to achieve the virtuous properties, your equipment, materials, and techniques need to be capable of it. There is a certain—slight—honor in that, I suppose.
But in general we should stop being such image virtue bigots, and stop seeing "image quality" as this great big value judgement looming above everything. We're not talking about morality here. We're just talking about the properties of photographs. No property automatically makes a photograph better. No property automatically disqualifies a photograph from being good. Being bigoted just closes us off to a greater range of possibility in our own work, and to a greater and more subtle range of possibility in the accomplishments of others.
—Time-Traveling Mike, from 2012
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