I’m eternally grateful that I have eyeballs. Wired to my brain. Ducted through my heart.

I’m endlessly fascinated by how light follows this path and produces an emotional tug on how people and things look. It’s never neutral. Capturing light as it exists, reproducing it from memory, or creating it from scratch is the challenge I relish in eliciting an immediate response from the viewer. It is how I approach making an image. It’s my way in; once I envision the light, the rest falls into place. I know how the picture will look.

Light is all the camera sees, but it never sees it the way I do in my mind. So I need to be the interpreter, translating the language of the light into the more limited language the camera can understand; otherwise, there’s a heartbreaking disparity between what I can see and imagine, and what I actually get.

Traditionally, camera settings were the primary tool for interpreting light. Conventional darkroom techniques allowed a further measure of control. Then the addition of flash or continuous illumination offered the opportunity to completely reinterpret, reshape, or re-create the light. Now, Lightroom and Photoshop have presented us with incredibly sophisticated tools to work with the light after the image has been captured.

This can be used to create fantastical effects and fiction, or to faithfully restore the image as seen or experienced, which is essentially a documentary pursuit. This is why I believe it is essential to understand and master these applications. It is critical for the photographer to make these post-production decisions. They are not purely aesthetic. They affect the narrative in an immediate and powerful way. Only the photographer knows what was originally seen, felt, and experienced. Only the photographer knows the intention driving the image.

Only the photographer can be its true author, and light is the key.

www.gregoryheisler.com

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