November 12, 2003

What is more important in an image - the quality of its appearance, or capturing that one unique moment in time?

A while back, Luke and I were entwined in a lengthy email conversation on the subject. It had sprung out of a discussion about camera equipment, and how much camera do you really need? Is it better to have the latest and greatest in equipment, the sharpest lens, the steadiest tripod - but you only pull it out when you really want to, and hence you miss a lot of shots you would have otherwise captured had you carried a smaller, but inferior-quality camera with you at all times?

Luke shoots with a small digital camera, and despite its shortcomings (he can't make nice big prints from the pics he takes, his camera is slow to focus, and has no settings for more creative approaches such as extreme macros, mirror-lockup for long exposures etc.), he can carry it always with him and is right there, ready to capture the moment when it presents itself. With the excellent eye he possesses, that happens more often than not.

So what happens if he captures that one unbelievable history-making event every photographer is waiting and living for? And what if the quality of the image sucks as a result of the small and inferior equipment? Will the image make less of an impact on photography as an industry or human kind as a whole?

Point in case is the image below.

I took it a few years ago, in the jungles of the Guatemalan ruin city of Tikal. The image is of a black howler monkey, sitting on a branch. I was almost at eye-level with him - after seeing the group move through the trees right above me and quickly climbing an overgrown temple in anticipation of their route. I ended up perched precariously between a swaying tree branch and the little more stable crumbling rock of the ruin, shooting with my Canon 10s, a F4 75-300mm Canon Ultrasonic zoom lens, no tripod, and on 200 Fuji Sensia slide film.

The problem was that howler monkeys are very shy, and at that time, they were also severly decimated after a yellow fever epidemic had killed off a good part of the local population. So seeing them in the first place was a nothing short of a miracle.

This group was moving through the tree crowns at an amazing speed. My howler was resting on a branch, maybe 10 feet away, and for less than a minute. For most of it, we were playing a game of peekaboo - he would stare at me curiously, but the moment I'd return his gaze, he would shyly look away.

I didn't want to scare him off, hoping for a good clean shot, but the only chance I got was when he was getting ready to take off again. He raised his face to the sky, a lone pinhole beam of light through the dense tree canopy hit his eye, and that's when I fired my camera. The sound of the shutter must have scared him, because he was gone in a flash.

Later, upon getting my slides back from the lab, I realized to my disappoinment that the shot turned out blurry - mostly due to the fact that the light meter in my camera hadn't been able to cope with the drastic colors of the monkey's jet-black fur and the random, blindingly bright sun beams streaming through the leafy canopy. The camera had made the exposure too long for it to be sharp, and I simply hadn't had enough time to make manual adjustments.

Yet I still treasure this image. I makes me fondly remember my close encounter with these awesome animals, and I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world.

Will I ever be able to sell or publish this image though? Probably not. Very few people (aside from the random stragglers stumbling across my website) will ever see it. Had I had a top-of-the-line pro camera and a superfast wildlife lens, I might have gotten the shot in all its glorious crispness, and it might have been marketable.

Plus - should the howler monkey ever become extinct (heaven forbids, although their status is already threatened), this image could have contributed to preserving the memory of this glorious species for many future generations to come.

As it is - it's nothing more than a blurry image of a howler monkey quite likely nobody will ever want to take a second look at - but me.