EDITOR'S LETTER

editor's LETTER Dayna Hamilton isn't happy.

And I don't think she'll be renewing her subscription. It's our photography that's bringing her down. “I grew up in Arizona,” she wrote in a letter to the editor, “and I fondly recall a beautiful Arizona Highways magazine of exceptional quality with stunning, lifelike pictures from the 1960s. Last year, I moved back to Arizona after spending 25 years in Colo-rado. I decided to subscribe to the amazing magazine that I'd admired so much from my younger days. I just received the July 2021 issue in the mail.” I've read thousands of letters to the editor, and I've learned to gauge their tone within the first few words. I could sense this one wasn't going to go our way. The pat on the back about our “stunning” pictures was just a setup, like Archie Moore luring an opponent into one of his dangerous counterpunches. In her second paragraph, Ms. Hamilton started swinging. “Hamilton,” by the way, isn't her real name. It's been changed to give her anonymity.

“I must tell you,” she continued, “that I'm very disappointed in the subpar quality of the photographs in the July issue. Just about every picture in this issue is so touched up — like way overdone touched-up. I realize a certain amount of retouching is required sometimes, but this issue's over-the-top touch-up is so blatantly obvious, it's almost funny. Definitely not the Arizona Highways I remember.” She wasn't finished. “The picture on page 34 looks so fake it's embarrassing,” she wrote, as if we were trying to pass off a Bob Ross as a Thomas Moran. “Even the front page has been over-tweaked with orange paint, or whatever is used to emphasize or make the objects in the picture more noticeable or vibrant.” Orange paint. That's a first. For decades, we've been accused of over-saturating, touching-up and Photoshopping our images, but no one has ever said anything about orange paint. To be clear, we never use orange paint on our covers, or anywhere else, and we never do anything to compromise the integrity of our photographs. Nevertheless, there's a tendency among some readers to say otherwise. Usually through comparison, as Ms. Hamilton has done.

It's human nature, I guess, to romanticize the past. Life was better when you had to pick up a phone, dial a number and have a real conversation. Maybe it's because those days reflect a better memory of ourselves. More hair. Fewer wrinkles. A glass half-full. But not everything was better back in the Sixties. There weren't any seatbelt laws, people smoked on airplanes and city trucks drove around spraying DDT. Mercifully, those things have changed. And so has technology. That's the reason for Ms. Hamilton's disappointment.

“Everything she remembers from the '60s was made on color transparency film,” Photo Editor Jeff Kida says, “and film sees things differently than digital. Digital cameras can capture a much greater dynamic range than transparency film ever did. Shadows are rendered more open. And highlights are not as blown out. The photos we publish today look a little different than they did in decades past. They're not better or worse, not real or fake, but they do look different.” Almost everything we publish today is digital, because that's what our best photographers like to shoot. Jack Dykinga, a Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime contributor, once thought of himself as “the digital Antichrist.” But he embraced the new technology when its capabilities exceeded what he could do with film.

That said, some people prefer the “soft look” of the old film photographs. I like them, too, but in the same way that an English horn is neither English nor a horn, the old stuff isn't always what it seems. And it's not as pure as you might think. One of our most prolific photographers in that era would build smoky fires in 55-gallon drums to accentuate the sunlight or create the illusion of fog in his photos. The drums were hidden out of view. Readers had no idea. Another photographer took it even further for a shot of Jerome. “The foreground needed interest,” he said. “So I moved the 8-foot-tall, 150-pound century plant 200 feet and replanted it to get the effect I wanted.” Those are extreme manipulations, but photographers have always taken advantage of the tools at their disposal. Even Ansel Adams “touched-up” his images. The only difference is that he used a darkroom instead of an iMac. “Watching Ansel print was like watching a ballet,” says Alan Ross, his longtime assistant. “The dodging wand or burning card was always in fluid motion.” The intent wasn't deceit. Mr. Adams was trying to replicate what he saw when he looked through his viewfinder.

Jeff does the same thing every month for this magazine. On the day that I got Ms. Hamilton's letter, he was “proof-ing color” for a portfolio we're calling the “fireplace collection.” “We do this for every photograph,” he says. “Our goal is to come as close to reproducing the natural world as we can, whether we're working with digital or film.” I trust Jeff, and his tremendous expertise, but I don't expect his explanation to alter the opinion of Ms. Hamilton, who ended her letter by writing: “I guess the good thing is that the yearly subscription was only $24. In this case, it looks like I'll get what I paid for.” Thank you for your feedback, Ms. Hamilton. Your opinion matters. But with all due respect, I beg to differ. I couldn't be more proud of the photography in Arizona Highways. And the men and women who make it.