The answer is both! Photographs can help or hinder us as artists. They can trick us into copying them exactly, yet provide excellent visual information to tell a story. When I first began painting, I relied heavily on photos. I copied exactly the values, colors, edges and every detail. Yet, no matter how good a reference photo I had, I could not produce a solid painting. I kept asking myself what I was missing. Finally it dawned on me—you can rely on reference photos for details and shapes, but colors and values cannot be trusted.
Photos will show outdoor mid-dark objects as a colorless black. This will contradict daylight ambience. To make matters worse, once you print out a digital photo there is even further deterioration of colors, which end up being muddy. After this revelation, my artwork surged to a new level.
To understand this, it helps to understand a bit about how a camera works. The shutter opens and closes in a fraction of a second. The amount of time the shutter stays open relates to the degree of light allowed in, which results in more light in the photo. The auto setting of the light meter of the camera measures a specific area and shoots with a predetermined shutter speed. If the sensor sees a bright light such as in the sky, the values in the photo will be accurate only in that specific area. Everything outside of that center point will get darker. If the light meter registers a dark area such as a group of evergreen trees, the sky will appear overexposed. This is how it’s possible to end up with two completely different photos of the same scene.
The photo on the left is under exposed because the center of the camera was aimed at the bright waterfall. The photo on the right is overexposed because the camera measured the dark evergreen trees. The naked eye would never see masses of evergreen trees that dark during the daytime like in the second photo. Likewise, you wouldn’t see a bleached out waterfall such as in the first photo. There were also far more colors in the rocks than could be seen in either photo.
You don’t want your painting to end up with dull, flat dark or over-exposed areas—so which photo should be used as reference? The answer is: both. The best thing to do is take several pictures of the same scene with variances in shutter speed. Even if the real scene does not have color variances, you as an artist should enhance monotonous colors to make the painting more interesting. Proficient artists basically use photos only for ideas and details, much like a movie director bases a film on a storyboard.