Clipping Obsession

A Mandari wrestler at a cattle camp near Terekeka, in the southern state of Bahr al-Jabal, Sudan. Wrestling bouts are regular fixtures between cattle camps, and test the strength and combat skills of young men. They rarely last longer than a minute and are won when one of the combatants throws or wrestles his opponent to the ground.

Clipping is a relatively new word for photography, but understood by almost everyone who uses a digital camera. A term definitely from the digital era; irrelevant for film. To recap, and at the risk of being tedious, clipping is the loss of image data either at the top end (highlights) through over-exposure, or at the low end (shadows) by under-exposing.

Film is – was – more forgiving to exposure extremes, because it responds less to over- and under-exposure than it does to average. Hence the S-shaped characteristic curve of film; you can see the response tailing off at the high and low ends. A digital sensor makes no such distinctions between large and small quantities of light. The ‘well’ for each pixel in the sensor just fills up at the same rate, and when the exposure is enough to reach the maximum, the result is simply featureless white. No visual information at all. The image has been clipped.

Digital sensor response lacks the forgiving roll-off at top and bottom

Okay, that’s the technical summary, and there’s more to research if you want to dig deeper. But the practical effect on photography has been interesting. Because we all (well, almost all) process our own images, we now find ourselves landed with the job that labs used to do. Every high-end camera, and every processing software, will show you if the highlights or shadows in an image have been clipped. And clipping is roundly condemned as a Bad Thing. It’s a mistake, an error, a sign that you have messed up somewhere.

Or is it? How did this suddenly come about? Stock agencies, which are now the source for a very significant proportion of published photographs, abhor clipping. In fact, if I submit a clipped image, I know it will get rejected.

You may have thought, for example, that you’d created a bright, glowing, high-key image? And you wanted it that way. Or a dark, moody scene bathed in Stygian shadows? Think again. What actually happened was that your image was rejected by the agency’s Quality Assurance system. Now it may be that over- and under-exposure is actually a mistake, but by no means always. What if you just liked the image that way? In the days of film, this was fine, even if not everyone shared your point of view. Now, however, it’s no longer a matter of taste, but a quality-police matter.

Histograms, which I might remind everyone were formerly understood only by people who had studied photography at college or who worked in a processing lab, now rule. While certainly useful as an objective view of what you’ve been doing, should they really be used to decide whether or not a photograph is ‘correct’? Sounds a bit like Edward Weston criticising Eugène Atget when he wrote that he was, “not a fine technician”. Somewhat dogmatic, to say the least. Personally, I don’t think they should, but the battle may already be over and the histograms have won.

My real issue with the obsession with clipping is that it introduces an insidious idea of normality. The danger of measurements – and whatever else digital photography has brought, it has spawned endless measurements – is that they are much easier for unimaginative people to assess than the actual photographs. It’s a sort of bean-counting approach to judging images.

And yet, and yet… skilfully captured and processed image quality is admirable, isn’t it?

What do you think? Or, if this were an exam paper…. ‘Clipping is good. Discuss!’

Some examples…

In this image below, the sunlight streaming onto the mud wall and floor is intense. Some recovery is possible in processing, but does it improve the shot? Technically it’s better, but does it also lose the harsh glow and impression of searing heat (and it was hot)?

Clipped highlights

Partly recovered highlights

In the following image, of the chapel in the Tower of London (shot on large-format film), I wanted flare and the sense of light streaming through. Traditionally, a knight-to-be would kneel at the altar in a night-long vigil. As the sun rose and light flooded through the window, the experience must have been intense.

And finally, the following silhouette of landscape Arch in Utah would not make it through a stock agency’s quality control either. The rock arch is mainly solid black, completely clipped. And the image is starker for that reason.

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Tags: clipping, digital, digital sensor, exposure, highlights, photography, pixels