One fateful day, in search of improved image quality, I upgraded my camera. I got a beautiful, used Nikon D200 and was in love – for a while. I started seeing spots in my images, but they didn’t bother me too much. I could clone them out in Lightroom quite easily. As the months wore on more and more spots appeared. Okay. Time for the dreaded sensor cleaning. I made a few half-hearted attempts with sensor-cleaning kits, but they didn’t seem to do much. It got to the point where my photos were unusable. I was missing my Olympus. So I switched back.

With the new Olympus, all was well for a while. My dust problems were a faint memory. I was content. And then, I started talking with a stock agency. They liked my photos, but the image quality was a problem. Olympus didn’t make anything with better image quality. Time for an upgrade. But (for all you thinking of making a living off it), nature photography doesn’t pay very well. So I went in search of cheap image quality, and ended up with a used Canon 5D. Yup, an old camera with no dust shaker and more sensor to get dirty. But this time I was determined. When dust became an issue, I swabbed, I wiped, I brushed, and I did it all very well. I used any and every commercial solution available to me. And they all failed horribly. Dust was driving me mad. It was time for the crazy. I tried a vacuum (with some distance – static electricity is dangerous to sensors) and I tried some homemade swabs. No luck.

It turns out my solution was Scotch Tape. I have read numerous times how tape will ruin sensors – this may be true. I tested it out on other glass surfaces to make sure no residue remained (I’ve read that’s the main concern with tape). I tried it when all hope was lost and I was thinking of giving up on the Canon but short on funds for another camera switch.

Now I’m gloriously dust free, and enjoying my 5D more than ever (besides still being nervous in the rain).

(I do not recommend that you try this on your sensor. In fact anyone with half a legal mind will tell you not to come within 10 feet of your sensor because you might ruin it.)

My 5D after many attempts at sensor cleaning. No, those are not birds or bugs.

My 5D after scotch tape. Exactly the same develop settings in Lightroom. Similar aperture.

So here’s me trying to do quick edits. I still gave myself a few days, but I wanted to get these up before I leave on my next trip (actually in a few hours) and this last one is forgotten. These are from just east of Jasper National Park.

Anna in Ogre Canyon near Brule

Icicles hanging from a cutaway

Spruce trees near Cadomin

Evening light on the river

An old abandoned railway

The first is from my Yellowstone trip of 2007. There seems to be some sort of interesting complimentary / reflective thing going on here. The yellow reeds are almost exactly mirroring the trees and mountain, and the water contrasts the sky – the tones are almost reversed while the colors are complimentary. Anyway, it caught my eye, and after staring at it for a while I do believe I like it.

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The second is just from last year in Jasper, but it got lost in the shuffle of more bold and colorful pictures (or maybe dark and brooding, I occasionally gravitate towards that). This one has a more quiet feel but still has a lot going on.

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I’m tired of people claiming “purity of image” or “truth” in an unedited photo. The moment you take a picture you are interpreting the scene – if you’re trying for truth, you’re a long way off. You choose the framing, you choose the lighting (yes even in natural light), you choose the angle, and you choose which pictures you show to people. If you’re a photographer, you are already interpreting – just possibly not enough to make any point.

If you don’t think you are interpreting a scene, I would like to hear from you. What are you doing? You are already limiting my view to a tiny window, and taking away all my other senses.

If you are trying to interpret a scene, why would you stop editing the moment it leaves your camera? You’re missing out on an opportunity to share your perspective. You could get rid of distracting elements that take away from your idea. You could add distracting elements if obfuscation is your goal. You think you made a perfect image that perfectly conveys your perspective? Possible, but chances are it could be clear, more compelling, and possibly more truthful – and you’re too lazy to do it. It is not cheating to use a different medium in a work of art.

Whether the point you are making is representing something truthful or not is a completely separate issue, and a hard one for many photographers. It depends a lot on the kind of photography you do. This has been a very hard question for me to answer in the past but its getting easier: I’m leaning more and more towards this not mattering. I am not seeking to represent truth. I’m seeking to represent beauty, loneliness, verdant life, desolation, quietness, grandeur – the list goes on and on. I’m not sure truth is something even to be considered in art photography. I’m more interested in the way the eye moves across a photo, the emotional responses it evokes, and the interplay of light and subject. I’m even occasionally interested in an analytical response.

If you dislike editing, fair enough. There are things you can do in the camera to create great photos, and many great photographers have done little post processing (although this is more rare than you might think). But to take an image that almost says something, and to not give it that final push is criminal. I’ve seen too many almost good photos in my life. Why would putting work into a piece of art be looked down upon? I can’t understand this.

So please edit your photos. I would like to see your perspective on life and truth. Some people will hate you for it, but I will be eternally grateful.

ps. For the record – I don’t do much editing on my photos, but I think I’m going to start to do more. I’m trying not to be so lazy myself.

Every once in a while I catch myself looking wistfully at shiny new motherboards, processors, graphics cards and cases. I remember assembling them all into a modular beauty. I can picture a black screen with a command prompt and a blinking cursor. Customizing a kernel module was a frustrating and wonderful thing at the same time. Sometimes I’m really tempted to go back to linux.

So it makes sense for a programmer to use linux, maybe even a web developer, but a professional photographer? Yeah, I dismissed it as ridiculous for a while. But one day I stumbled across Bibble. Hmmm, a raw developer that works on linux. Sure there’s always been dcraw, but for managing a catalog of thousands of raw files, that really is not going to work. But Bibble is interesting. I tried a preview of version 5 on my mac, and honestly I liked the results a bit better than out of Lightroom. But here’s the problem: version 4 doesn’t support my camera, and version 5 was supposed to be out about 2 years ago – and it’s still not done. That makes me wonder about future support.

So I’m still looking wistfully at those computer parts and dreaming of linux. Don’t ask me why – I’m not missing anything on my Mac. Maybe I’m a bit sentimental.