Jack Baruth Doesn’t Know He’s a Photographer

On Being A Photographer

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 8

Now here I go again
I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
And have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

The Sunday Reader, June 29, 2025

By 1948 Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” had been a hit for seven years, appearing in magazines and galleries, and the subject of constant streams of appreciation and requests to buy prints of the image.

Indeed the only person who was unhappy with Moonrise was...Ansel Adams.

Adams had printed the image hundreds of times over that 7 years, at which point he decided he couldn’t get the image he wanted out of the negative, and toned it in a chemical developing agent called selenium.

So which is the authentic Moonrise? The original negative? But Adams made decisions about how to frame and expose that negative; no one else would have taken that same shot. How about the first 7 years of prints?

And then there’s the problem of the eye versus the camera. Film, which Adams was shooting, has a dynamic range of 10 to 13 stops, while high end digicams have a little more, in the 15 stop range. Dynamic range is the spread between the darkest part of an image that still shows detail, and the brightest part that still shows detail.

The dynamic range of the human eye is 25 to 30 stops. And each stop is a doubling of the light.

That means the human eye sees orders of magnitude more than any camera. Any image, then, is a compromise between what the photographer sees and what the camera can capture.

Photography is the art of envisioning, and then translating that vision into a physical image. It’s a process, a process that starts with noticing those details in the first place.

Anyone can be taught to operate a camera competently.

Seeing the world’s crucial details, life’s decisive moments...That cannot be taught. You see them, or you don’t.

That’s why Jack Baruth is a photographer, even though he doesn’t know it.

This makes me wish I understood how to take a decent photo. Alas, I do not. But I can see the appeal! Jack wrote in response to our look at the Leica Monochrom camera in the Huawei P9 smartphone.

Actually, Jack, you'd make a pretty good photographer. There are two parts to being a photographer: the mechanics of working a camera, which I can teach anyone; and the ability to see the important details in the world. Which can be nurtured, but people either see these details, or don't.

Jack sees these details. Details like these, which he’d just written about: I’d staked them in such a way that I wouldn’t be able to install the deer-shield tubing she’d purchased at my specific request, but I thought they’d make it anyway. Which they did, taking root after a few hard rains and shooting out new branches lined with tiny oval leaves that flashed emerald in the sun.

Jack sees these critical details; that's the hard part.

I’ve always been lucky. I’ve always been a writer. I’ve always been a photographer.

Those three are the same thing.

Opportunity knocks on every door, my old dad used to say, but some people are always in the bathroom.

Dad was funny. But Dad was right.

Dr. Richard Wiseman proved it.

Wiseman was researching people who think they are lucky, and people who think they are not. When he’d assembled enough of each to form two separate groups, he did an experiment:

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a very simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both (self-identified) lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message "Stop counting—There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. Just for fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper. This one announced: "Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

I’ve always seen all those details. I subconsciously read the words on every t-shirt people wear on the street, the text on every bottle and jar, the accoutrements on every car and house and building. This is good for being a photographer and writer, and not so good for being a normal human being.

Like the time my editor at Pacific Stars & Stripes chewed me out for photographing and interviewing people during a riot INSTEAD OF RUNNING AWAY TO SAFETY LIKE A SANE PERSON.

I was so focused on capturing the details of the riot with my cameras and notepad that I had somehow missed the danger of INTERVIEWING PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE OF A RIOT until he started screaming at me.

Ansel Adams saw the details. He’d seen a certain bright white on the crosses in the foreground of Moonrise, and worked 7 years to get that in a print. Then he took a crazy chance. He had a single negative of Moonrise, and he treated it with selenium. If it had gone wrong, he would have destroyed one of his best and most profitable works.

That kind of obsession is understandable. Getting the image out from where it’s stuck in your head and onto a print or a screen can haunt you.

I’ve been there. Consider this photo:

When I was first a photographer I saw something that haunted me. I was standing on the dock of the south Shelter Island Ferry, watching an enormous sun setting into Peconic Bay, sea birds wheeling in front. I stood mesmerized…it looked like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom. I half expected to see John Carter crossing the Peconic in a sloop.

I was furious I didn’t have my camera. Which, in retrospect, was pretty dumb. My camera was a Pentax ME my editor had given me, with a 50mm lens loaded with Tri-X. Not particularly a good setup for that kind of shot.

In fact that day set off two obsessions. First, I looked for a way to recapture that shot. Second, I began collecting cameras I could carry anywhere so I’d never again be without one. Imagine a progression of Domke bags loaded with metric tons of gear, of Pentax Auto 110s and Qs and Panasonic Lumix digicams. These days I’m fairly happy with my setup: the Sony Xperia Pro-I smartphone, which is basically a Sony RX100 with a phone attached; and the Huawei P9, with its Leica Monochrom camera.

Of course if I’m going photographing I generally carry a bigger camera.

OK, two.

And maybe several lenses.

As for that Barsoomian sunset, after several decades of desultory searching I found a likely spot: Key West’s Mallory Square. There was a clear view to the sun setting over the horizon uninterrupted by clutter.

Key West is more than 1,000 miles from where I live in Tejas, but in those years my parents vacationed in the area. So I went, every February, and spent time with them, and photographed the sun setting west of Mallory Square.

For years. Hundreds of frames. Until I made this photo.

Did I finally get it right?

All I know is that image is no longer stuck in my head.