The photograph I bring home from a muskox day is rarely the photograph I want to keep. The animal is there, horns and that skirt of hair, and so is a willow stem, a boot, a pale sky that has blown out, and a friend who stepped into the edge of the frame at the wrong second.
I used to treat that mess as the price of being there. It is, partly. Field light does not wait, and a muskox does not pose on a clean background because I asked nicely. What I can still do, later, at a kitchen table, is decide what the picture is actually of.
What a clean plate means
A clean plate, for me, means the animal reads first. The eye, the horn, the weight of the body. Not a catalogue of everything that happened to be in the valley. I am not trying to pretend the place was empty. I am trying to make a picture a stranger can understand in one glance.
The first edit is not a slider. It is a crop in my head. I ask what I would point at if I were telling the story out loud. On a Dovrefjell day that answer is usually the face, or the whole animal small against the hill. Our notes on meeting muskoxen in Dovrefjell are about the living animal. This is about the file I made of it.
Puffin photographs have the same problem in a brighter costume. The beak is so loud that a messy background becomes a second argument. A rock, another bird, a tourist's blue jacket. If the jacket wins, I do not have a puffin picture. I have a picture of a trip, which is a different and lesser thing.
Crop and remove the competing background
I start in the browser, because I do not want a new program for a job this small. The point is a background that stops competing, and I still want the file at a size I can judge. Succo Design keeps an online image resizer free to open beside the other browser tools, on an ordinary laptop, with the original file still safe in a folder I have not overwritten.
The step I mean is a background remover. I am not asking it to invent a muskox. I am asking it to lift the animal off the willow so I can see the shape I actually photographed. If the horns come back with a halo of leaves, I stop. A halo is a lie I can see, and if I can see it, the picture is not finished.
I put the cut-out on a flat background next, usually a warm grey or a paper white, and I look at the edge at a size bigger than the screen wants. Fur is the test. Muskox hair is long and uneven. A tool that turns it into a smooth stuffed toy has misunderstood the animal. I would rather keep a little of the real hill than publish a plastic edge.
Contrast and honest edges
Contrast is the second look, and I do it before I fall in love with the cut-out. A dark animal on a dark grey can vanish even when the cut was honest. I lighten the ground, or I darken it, until the shoulder separates from the square without the hair turning into a chalk outline. That check takes a minute. Skipping it has wasted whole evenings.
I do the same with a puffin when the rock was the same value as the black back. The beak will always shout. The body is what disappears. If I cannot see the wing line, the plate is not clean, it is only loud. Loud is easy in these photographs. Clean is the harder compliment.
There is a temptation to repair the face. I do not. A wet nose, a squint, a horn that is chipped: those are the animal I stood near. The wildlife photography habits I try to keep start in the field, with distance and with not crowding a resting beast. The laptop is not where I get to improve an animal's character.
Keep the messy original
I also keep the messy original. The clean plate is for a page or a talk. The original is the field note. It shows who else was there, how close I was, and whether the light was as kind as my memory claims. Memory is the thing the original file is allowed to argue with.
If the remover eats a leg or a tail, I do not "fix" it by painting one in. I go back to a gentler crop and let the hill stay. A missing leg is a worse falsehood than a busy background. Anyone who has watched muskoxen walk will see the mistake immediately, and they should.
Color is the quiet part of contrast. Field photos lean blue when the sky is the main light, or yellow when the willow is. I do not chase a postcard. I chase the difference between the horn and the hair, and between the hair and the ground I chose. If those three separate, the plate is doing its job.
I check the picture small, the size of a phone, and large, the size of a lap. Small tells me whether the shape survives. Large tells me whether the edge is a cheat. A plate that only works at one size is a plate I do not trust in a post, because people will meet it at both sizes without asking me.
The same afternoon I might be sorting a reindeer frame from a different valley, and the discipline should match. Reindeer, eagles, and muskoxen east of Jotunheimen are not one animal, and they should not become one brown blur in a folder called wildlife. A clean plate is how I keep them from collapsing into each other.
I name the file after the place and the animal, not after the edit. Dovrefjell, muskox, the date. The version with the flat ground gets a second word, plate, so I never send the wrong one to someone who asked for the day as it was. The day as it was still exists. It is just not always the picture I want to lead with.
There is a limit to how much of the hill I am willing to erase. If the story is the animal in the willow, the willow stays, and I only lift a distracting boot or a bright jacket. Removing the world entirely is a studio choice. I should know I am making it, and I should not call the result a habitat photograph.
A puffin on a cliff is the same decision. The cliff is sometimes the point: the drop, the other birds, the weather. Then I leave it and I work on contrast until the white face is not a hole in the rock. Other times the bird is the whole sentence. Then the cliff can go, and the plate can be quiet.
Stop before the animal becomes plastic
I work in short sessions. Ten minutes, then I stand up and look at something that is not a screen, then I come back and see the halo I missed. Fatigue makes me kind to bad edges. The animal does not benefit from my kindness. It benefits from an edge that looks like hair, feather, or stone.
When the plate is done I compare it to the original one last time, side by side. If I have made the animal larger than life, or calmer than it was, I undo that. A muskox at ease and a muskox deciding about me are different pictures. I want the one I was actually in front of.
The browser is enough for this. I do not need a drawer of plugins to respect a photograph I took in the wind. I need a way to lift a background, a way to see contrast, and the sense to stop before the file becomes a smoother animal than the one that looked up.
About Lars Haugen
Lars Haugen is a field ornithologist and writer from Trondheim. He has led birdwatching tours in Trøndelag for over ten years and writes about birds, equipment, and great locations in Norway.