by Allen Kuhlow
I’ve never been a big fan of bracketing as a photographic technique. It was costly when film was the medium for recording an image; it seems even less necessary with the instant feedback that digital photography provides.
I’ve never been a big fan of bracketing as a photographic technique. It was costly when film was the medium for recording an image; it seems even less necessary with the instant feedback that digital photography provides.
However, I love the freedom that digital photography provides. Knowing that I don’t have to pay for film and its processing has inspired me to create more variety in my images. So now I am passionate about bracketing – bracketing to exercise my creativity!
I’ve included two pairs of images to show you what I mean. This first pair was created in Florence, Italy. The top of Brunelleschi’s famous dome is featured in a closeup in this pair of images. The basic difference between these two images is a slight tilt in one of them. The first image, in which the dome and its cupola are more vertical, seems solid and grounded. The second image, the tilted one, seems more fluid, and it seems to pull my eye upward into the sky.
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Duomo, Florence, Italy - © Allen R. Kuhlow
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The second pair of images came from the front window of a Florentine gelateria, not too far from Brunelleschi’s famous dome. Here, the difference is the result of using both of the cameras I was traveling with: my vertical camera and my horizontal camera. I usually see more than one image before I bring my camera to my eye, so I held my camera horizontal and created the first image. I found myself thinking about how many gelato cones this shop must sell every day! Then I was drawn to the height of the stacks, and I thought about how many scoops of gelato each person stacked on these cones. This became the inspiration for the vertical image.
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| Gelato Cones, Florence, Italy - © Allen R. Kuhlow |
I seldom keep multiple versions of each image I create, but the practice of creating them gets my creativity moving and sets me free to look around and explore with the camera. Digital photography has expanded my freedom to try new ideas, to concentrate on the image and not on the camera.
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