Tag: Inpainting

I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me.

It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original picture.

I wandered around that corner for quite some time trying to get the right angle that would capture the window, the table, the building, and the sky. There was no ideal spot that isolated the building in just the way I wanted. So I settled for what seemed to be the best composition. Unfortunately, that composition had a massive building dominating the left half of the frame:

Easy enough to remove in post-processing. That’s why they invented the healing and inpainting brushes and the clone-stamp tool. A few minutes with my preferred editing program and the skyscraper was gone. Nobody would be any the wiser.

Except I know what I did. And for me, knowing that I cloned out half the frame ruins the final image. The effort to remove the offending building became an interesting exercise in how much manipulation I can accept. I have no problem with various local adjustments and will make small distractions disappear. But at some point it becomes too much for me. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I certainly can’t quantify it. But as a rule of thumb: When the manipulation changes the mood or tone of the photo entirely, as it does in the images here, it is too much for me.

Two caveats: First, my rule of thumb is almost certainly grounded in some combination of a romantic notion of photographic integrity and a preference for one type of labor (walking around and looking for the perfect frame) over another (editing on a computer). Second, this is my rule of thumb for my photographs, and is not meant to apply to anybody else or that person’s photographs.

I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the emptiness. Glancing up at one corner, I noticed a table next to a window in a low-rise office building.

Nine months ago, I probably could have waited long enough to catch somebody standing at the window, transforming this photo from a minimalist picture into an Edward Hopper-esque photograph.

Even without the person, I really like this photo. It captures the image I had hoped to find that afternoon. I like the loneliness it suggests. The table that earlier this year would have been a meeting place for colleagues to chat and share some gossip, or a place for somebody to take a quick break is today collecting dust, like so many tables and desks in offices everywhere.