Thinking about Photo Cropping while Looking at the Snowscape

The autumn has totally disappeared and the winter has come here in Japan. The temperature has significantly dropped, and now is the time to wear coats every day.

I reckon that the typical winterscape should be snow. It is only a few times per year to see snowscapes in Tokyo or Yokohama, but deep in the mountaineous areas of Japan, they already seem to have lots of snow. And this village, Takayama Village, must be one of them.

I found that as I went up from Suzaka Station towards the east by bus, there was more and more snow on the street. I walked a bit from the last bus stop and found a landscape where the trees and snow went along well under the faint mist along the ridge.

Snowscape tends to be monotone. Photos of snowscapes are likely to be based on the colors of white and black. As there are less colors there, faint differences of colors and picture quality stand out the most.

I'm quite enthusiastic about how I describe "mist". You can see my enthusiasm on the posts about Tanagura Town, whose supporters' ambassador I'm engaged in. I'm enthusiastic about how the mist creates the faint border where what should exist turns into what can't exist.

The photo above was down-sized into 1600px in width. Indeed, we cannot tell the slight differences of the colors and the picture quality from this photo. This is not compressed in quality in Jpeg format so the picture quality is much higher than when uploaded to SNS such as Facebook. But still, it is impossible to tell for us.

※Please refer to this past post about the deterioration of picture quality.

This is why I cropped the top left range of the photo.

I somehow find how the ridge grow hazy. It seems like I now can see the existence of the trees on the border area!

I clearly find the narrow branches on the second photo, which I couldn't recognize in the first. Well, I do not stop my challenge here. I would like to crop the second photo again...( ! )

I cropped the ridge again. This is the original, un-resized width of 1600px. Although I find some roughness when I see this through Retina Display, I know that I cannot recognize this roughness through any other kinds of displays.

Let's see the border, again. Although I only found the existence of the trees themselves in the second photo, the un-resized photo let me feel even the heaviness of each pile of snow on each branch. I can clearly recognize the branches in the haze, too.

I feel it worth visiting deep in the mountainous area when I come to feel the faint differences of existence over the border. However, I also found out one sad fact. I ended up finding the difference from only the third, thus, the very cropped photo.

If I try to feel my enthusiasm and enjoy the high picture quality in such a wide-angle photo, I need really a big display of 4K or 5K resolution.

That is, my enthusiasm is highly dependent on your operating environments like devices and browsers. And thus, those who see this post through their smartphones do not recognize it.

This is excessive quality.

We do not need this quality if we see them on the internet.

Then, why do we demand this extremely high quality? Photographers need to have their own answers.

"The purpose is to make audience receive as much the same stimulus as I did in my own experience and generate high resonance with them, by realizing as high picture quality as possible in describing my view in my own point of view and sharing it with others through photography."

My current answer is like this. I reckon that the idea of resonance is a big keyword. But I also reckon that the current appreciation environment of photography on the internet is full of a bit shallower, spinal-reflex-like empathy and sharings.

This excessive quality appears to lie in front of the bipolarization of the value of photography, rather than is out of touch with the modern world. Mr. Kent Shiraishi, my honorable photographer, said about this topic on his blog.

I compared 8K, 4K, and Full High-Vision displays there. In the first place, I saw the 8K display. And I was thrilled by its miniteness and its great stereoscopic effect. It was indeed like "it exists there". I saw my creation on the 8K and felt that I was happy to live long to see such a beautiful picture in my life. I was about to cry. (#^.^#)

Then I saw it on the 4K display. The picture quality deteriorated significantly, and lacked its great stereoscopic effect. And well, it was like going back to the times of record music to see it on the Full High-Vision display... (Quoted and translated from Kent Shiraishi Photo Studio)

The value to demand 8K, and the value to be moved by Instagram photos and share them are both related to photography, but were born and brought up in totally different places. In the following context, Mt. Kent Shiraishi told his resolution.

By the way, I foresight that the world of photography and advertizement will change dramatically if 8K displays get popular among ordinary homes in the next few years. Of course, we, the photographers, must change our minds to survive in the world of only a few years later.

While looking forward to the 8K times coming in three years, I continue to be thorough the most in picture quality. And colors. I indeed felt that they are very important. Will my photos be enjoyed in 8K? Will my photos have enough quality to be appreciated in 8K? (Quoted and translated from Kent Shiraishi Photo Studio)

I found lots of his extreme thoroughness in the latter half of his post. To tell the truth, I myself, or rather my macbook pro, is not enough to recognize the difference of this high picture quality.

• Who buys 8K three years later?
• What do they think when they buy 8K?
• How do they change their actions and minds when they see 8K?

I reckon that the current situation that nobody-around-me-including-me understands this thoroughness is the proof of the bipolarization of the value of photography. And I felt that I must make much more efforts in my photography.