Dark Shadows

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Waiting Oil 8 x 10” John Hulsey

Why go to the trouble of painting from life when our cameras can take such great pictures? Digital cameras have gotten so good at taking properly exposed, beautiful photos that they can fool us into thinking that they are also accurate. To be sure, the technology packed into even an inexpensive camera is incredibly powerful, but that technology comes with a big bias toward the “pleasing” side of things. Pleasing the greatest number of people may be a good marketing strategy for camera makers, but it isn’t for art, and unless one wants to spend big amounts of time massaging photos in Photoshop, the pictures we take outdoors, especially, are a far cry from reality as we can see it with our own eyes.

One way in which the technology is weak is in the way the camera measures light in a contrasty subject—one that has strong shadows. The camera sensor cannot see as broad a range of values as our eyes can, so it must…