I'm with Jeremy. Reality is often overrated.
+1
But I'll take it one step further in asking: is your goal to capture reality? Or is your goal to capture what you feel or experience? This the point I've tried to make on other posts. Capturing reality is a great starting point, but really folks, is that why we are making photographs and we're sharing here on this forum - to capture reality, or to say something more?
Think of all the great photos you've ever seen by the masters both past and present...in almost every case, the photographer has done an amazing job of not merely capturing reality, but they then transform that reality into something more than reality. This is true for B&W and colour. For B&W, it's is a dead give-away that we aren't looking at reality. The colour photos, though, have "fooled" us the most in that we
think we are looking at reality, but in fact, it's a view of reality skillfully crafted by the photographer into a form of hyper-reality.
This is the difference between photographs as documents and photographs as "art". There's nothing wrong with shooting pictorially accurate documents - in the right hands they can be stunningly beautiful - but there is so much more we can put into our work to keep it reflective of not just what we saw, but also of what we felt and experienced.
This is such a difficult concept to put into words. Suffice it to say that perhaps we should ask ourselves, given the time and money we've spent on equipment and travel to make photographs, is it enough to reproduce reality? Sometimes it is, as we want to document our lives, or that may be the point we're at in our photographic journey, but I'm willing to bet one has much to gain by striving for more, and I think that's at the root of this rather long-winded post (and perhaps what Scott, kikashi and Erik were getting at).
