You`ve heard the adage, ”The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Well, I`m beginning to believe the more things change, the more they change. Period.
I was looking through some very old negatives of mine the other day. I mean first-camera-ever-owned negatives. One of them triggered my brain into action.
I took the shot on a warm spring day in Chicago`s New Town while out for a walk during my lunch hour. I was the newly appointed articles editor of a national magazine and was pretty cocky, the way kids get when everything is going their way.
I remember looking at a rather unusual wooden door. All of the glass panes in the door were caked with the dirt and grime of the inner city. One pane was missing, as though it had been broken long ago and not replaced.
The open pane afforded me a look into a courtyard of sorts, and a shaded picket gate across the yard stared back at me, daring me to guess what lay behind.
I never did guess, of course. In fact, I can`t recall that I ever even tried, at least not very hard. I was too taken with the symbolism of the moment–a sort of through-the-looking-glass feeling of peeking through one entranceway right into another, of staring past one soul right into a second. I believe I photographed the scene with a telephoto zoom lens set at about 140 mm. from a distance of two feet from the outer door. And the photograph isn`t bad. But it`s not what I`d do today. Not by a long shot.
If I stumbled across the same scene today, here`s what I`d do with it.
1. I`d start by wiping the dirty panes of glass clean. There`s no crime in photographing dirt, but the haze over the glass makes the reflected images look overexposed and out of focus, as if I did something wrong to the print in the darkroom.
2. I would set my exposure according to the reading of the courtyard taken through the broken pane instead of using an average reading of everything in the scene. I might even deliberately underexpose the scene slightly to prevent the detail in the highlight areas from washing out so much.
3. I would center the broken frame in the finder. That would create tension and add a sense of drama to the scene. Centering subjects isn`t always a good idea. But this case calls for bending the rules.
4. I would give serious thought to using a slightly longer lens–say, 200 mm. or so–in order to enlarge the size of the courtyard gate and reduce slightly the number of panes in the foreground. That would help draw attention to the gate as the obvious center of attraction.
5. I would consider manipulating the finished black-and-white print by selectively hand-coloring portions of it. Most likely I would color the courtyard with various shades of green and brown while leaving the outer door frame uncolored. The part colored/part uncolored photo would lend a unique aura to the photo and leave a fantasylike impression with the viewer.
6. Finally, and this may be the most significant indication of the way I`ve changed over the last 15 years, I would question whether or not I should take the shot at all. Sometimes, making a few alterations and approaching a scene a certain way results in a winning photograph. Other times . . . well, you never know.
