the blue bracken

the blue bracken, originally uploaded by jamesburden.

I love walking in woods that have bears in them – the way it quickens my pulse and heightens my awareness. Unfortunately we have no bears in England, so woodland walks tend to be somewhat tame – beautiful, but tame. So instead you look for beauty in the ordinary, for remarkable in the usual. And every now and again you find it – if you look really hard…

I know that this is a little unusual and most definitely not straight out of the camera. But as photographers we do more than simply reflect what we see through our lenses. We tell the story ourselves. There is often perceived kudos attached to a lack of manipulation of the image, and I wonder if we spend too much time defending ourselves against accusations of digital manipulation. As soon as you frame a scene in your viewfinder and press the shutter you are digitally manipulating the shot. If you choose a shallow depth of field, or use ND filters you are manipulating the shot – we don’t see the world like that. Whether in post-production you choose to crop or desaturate, how you choose to tone or frame, is simply an extension of the photographer interpreting and conveying a scene.

In this image I want to communicate cold, fragility, brokenness and perseverance. Is it so strange that I should adapt the image to help convey that? If I wanted to portray that in a poem or prose I would shape the language, choose the sound and colour of the words, the length of the sentences… Why should it be different in photography?

I’m not decrying the marvellous images (far far better than mine) here on flickr and elsewhere that are graphically realistic and evidently pretty much straight out of the camera. But why limit our visual world to just that? Sometimes I want my physical world to go beyond the bounds of reality…