FUZZY LOGIC

By MICHAEL PERKINS

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

PHOTOGRAPHERS DISAGREE ABOUT NEARLY EVERYTHING. That’s to be expected, given that we are, as artists, all on such very individual trajectories. How can we reach consensus on what makes a picture “work”? Or what constitutes a “composition”? Or “realism”? Sometimes we cannot even find common ground on what very common terms about photography even mean.

Take the terms focus and sharpness, both of which can be used to define the resolution in an image. Both words are an attempt to measure something, but exactly what? And in whose view are these terms either final or arbitrary, anyhow? I make a very simple distinction between the two, and it helps me to keep my own thinking more organized. For me, the word focus is less about definition than it is about where I want the eye to be directed within a frame. In fact, most dictionaries’ first definition of the word is “the center of interest or activity.”, which to me means the place where the story should be happening. By comparison, sharpness, to me, speaks mostly of the distinction of fine details in a photo. Focus can mean sharpness, but, in my workflow, these contrasting connotations are helpful.

Thinking of the two terms as complementary to each other gives me a fairly consistent way of prioritizing them in a photograph. Focus, then, speaks of where I want to direct the viewer’s attention, while sharpness refers to how detailed I want that focal object to be rendered. In the image above, the focus of the narrative is obviously the two blurry children running into the frame. I could have made the adjustments necessary to make them as sharp as the figures in the background, but recording their speed seemed important to me, and so I anchored the general picture in sharpness to enhance the kids’ role as the picture’s focus. Make sense?

Doesn’t actually matter. You will define terms as befits your own approach to your own work. How can you do anything else? The take-home: don’t let anyone tell you that there is something like a fixed rule in photography. Of course we’ll disagree. Of course we’ll argue. But what takes us beyond argument is whether the results validate our approaches. The rest is noise.