Fine art photographers, however, are not concerned with capturing Aunt Martha and the grandkids, or the Grand Canyon, or the emotional experience of a church service, but expressing their thoughts and feelings about vistas, people, and events. It’s a different ballgame for them, one where they seek infinite possibilities in the expression of their view.

Sometimes they have a worldview that dominates their thinking, and they insert that worldview in their image with unspoken editorial comment. Other photographers manage to get out of the way of the projection of their worldview onto their work, and let the scene speak for itself. Take Salgado: he is a man on a mission, exposing man’s inhumanity to humanity but he does so creating masterpieces of fine art, haunting and evocative works about very unbeautiful, unbelievably unjust and inhumane treatment of men and women by other men and women.

…whether we are speaking of the digital photographer, or the film giants of previous generations… the ultimate goal remains the same — the use of photography to express one’s thoughts and feelings about the scene before the lens.

His images capture injustice, but beautifully. Fine art instincts dominate his creations. His thoughts and feelings about the happening before his lens are captured in such a way as to leave a strong, permanent impression on the mind of his audience. (It’s good to recall that he reported that he began his professional life as an economist with the World Bank, with a goal of helping people. He said he came to the conclusion he could do more to make a difference in the world with a camera.) I for one am glad he made the professional decision to lay down his economic tools and replace them with a camera.

In his kind of photography, there is risk-taking, artistic judgment, and the expressive creative process as he captures the scene before his lens. And, the more purely he does it, the rawer the feelings and thoughts he reveals, he expresses, the stronger and more universal his impact, as this rawness hits our own nerves, our thoughts and feelings, changing us forever in our consideration of the inhumanity he exposes.

As noted before, today’s photographers create differently if they work in digital photography. With Adobe® Photoshop®, for example, they can simply create a blank layer on top of the background image and change the blend mode of that new layer, resulting in the downward flow of an Adobe-created algorithm onto the layer below it. They can modify the blend mode, for example, to “overlay,” which allows them to digitally “paint” with black and white light, adding or subtracting luminosity or darkness to an image, shaping, molding emphasis, deleting or reducing it as need be.

They can and do add more blank layers for hue adjustments, or saturation, or color, and paint on each layer. They can even de-saturate an area on a saturation layer by painting with black and white, or the absence of color, or add saturation to an area by painting with a bright, vivid color. And when done, they merge their layers up, so that they don’t loose the ability to come back later and make further changes.

One of the most powerful digital tools is the luminosity mask for adding luminance to the mid-tones to lightest areas in an image, greatly expanding the dynamic range of photographs. It’s like a light box used by Weston and Adams, but with millions of bulbs that selectively choose which pixels the modern photographer wants to add brightness to.

The control available to the modern photographer is virtually infinite because each layer can be altered in its opacity, extending the reach of today’s fine artist.

But whether we are speaking of the digital photographer, or the film giants of previous generations like Salgado, Weston or Adams, the ultimate goal remains the same — the use of photography to express one’s thoughts and feelings about the scene before the lens. And the mastery of the tools must precede the conscious choice of subject and ground before making the exposure and contemplating its manipulation in the darkroom of the film photographer or the “Lightroom” of the digital photographer.