Lake Havasu

Lake Havasu, originally uploaded by Gamut's Edge.

Since I am on first year first officer pay right now I’ve had to substitute orders from amazon.com with trips to the Library. Yesterday we went to the Fond du Lac public library to get some books for Ella. I picked up a couple photography books also. One of the books was by the photographer Eliot Porter. This might reveal my compete ignorance; I had never heard of him before. Here’s a Wikipedia link for those readers as undereducated as me.

The book is full of gorgeous color prints. As I looked through the book I began to notice that none of the photos had a pure white tone. Even photos of snow didn’t have a single speck of white that matched the white of the paper the photos were printed on. The pictures still looked marvalous. This set me to thinking about my own photo editing techniques. I always strive for the white areas in my pictures to be pure white after post process. For me figuring out a white point and a black point is the starting point for setting the correct contrast. None of Elliot Porter’s photos had a pure white and they still looked perfectly natural and realistic. Many of his landscapes feel like you could walk right into them. Maybe I don’t need a pure white either.

That brings me to the photo at the top of this post. It’s lake Havasu, Arizona. I took this picture three days ago, but I didn’t edit it until this morning. During the post process I did my best to make this photo look like an Elliot Porter print. Notice, there is nothing pure white in this picture.