A Philosophy of Photography

When I first caught the photography bug in the 1980s, it was certainly a different world.  However, some practices became ingrained and I have grappled with them since rediscovering my passion for photography and starting Mountain Tinker in the spring of 2017.  Back then, the image was what you got and modifying it - even just cropping - was near anathema. At least that’s how I learned it. In the world of digital photography, and with the ease of powerful post-processing tools, modifying images seems taken as a matter of course.  To me, however, this quickly becomes a different art form and to call it photography can be misleading.

Here are some core values I hold to:

Honesty and transparency - if I’ve done any significant post-processing to an image, even just to make it better reflect reality, I will say so.  I know that might sound like giving myself an out - what qualifies as ‘significant’? To me, this is anything beyond things like minor cropping, touching up a few dust specks, or minor filtering to get an image to print correctly.

A conservation and land ethic - respect for the land and life that depends on it.  This is a fundamental and lifelong value to me and means I will do my best not to disturb wildlife and to leave the land as I found it, if not better.   Here is where cropping an image rather than trying to get closer to an animal is a more than acceptable form of post-processing.  This ethic also means that I will not stage images in nature - I won’t place or move things to ‘enhance’ the composition. Everything in my images will be as I found it.