In 1998 when we announced a series of LensWork workshops, we received a call from a famous workshop instructor who complimented us on our offerings but advised that if we wanted to make money with a workshop program we had to offer nude workshops. By that I assume he meant nudes as models, not nude photographers. I thought about his suggestion for three nanoseconds and rejected it.

You've probably all heard that old outdoorsman's canard that there is no such thing as bad weather, there's just bad clothing. I think the same logic can apply to light and photography. There is no such thing as bad light, there are, however, subjects that look better in one kind of light compared to another.

Perhaps there are technical definitions for focus and sharpness I should know, but my intuition tells me there is a difference. Focus is an optical relationship between the lens and the sensor or film plane. Sharpness is a visual sensation about the smallest details.

There was a period in my creative life in which I sold prints matted and framed, ready for the wall. I regularly received the most curious feedback, however, that people would unframe my print and put it in a frame of their choice, a frame that matched the decor of their room. I've even had people removed my print from the mat board and re-mat it in a style and color of their choosing.

I've witnessed numerous discussions in which a photographer has proposed the idea that there is one perfect size for every image. Making that image smaller or larger somehow diminishes it. I don't bring this topic up to attack or defend it, but rather to ask the simple question how do they know? In order to determine that there's one perfect size for a given image we would need to make it in every possible size to determine which one is the best! I don't ever recall anyone actually doing this. Perhaps the best size is the one you make.

There is a distinct difference between photography that shows us the world and photography that shows us the artist's conception of the ideal world. The digital age has magnified Utopian Photography. I just watched a YouTube video in which a Photoshop guru improved a picture of a beautiful woman by brightening her teeth, deepening the color of her eyes, and removing all blemishes from her skin. He made a lovely photograph of a beautiful woman, but a thoroughly idealized one.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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In the 1970s and '80s, there was a huge uptick of people engaging fine art photography. I suspect this was the result of luminaries like Ansel Adams bringing photography to the masses, but also a result of the increased quality of image reproduction in books. I never attended an Ansel Adam's workshop, but I've seen lots of pictures of those enthusiastic youngsters at Adams workshops.

Every artist who knows their craft can explain it with some amount of detail. Does knowing how they do it make our appreciation of their accomplishment any deeper? Or is it better to be amazed and let go of our questions about how it was done?

I remember visiting the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s and seeing on display a collection of tiny prints in very large frames. As I recall, they were 35mm contact prints presented and framed in 16x20 matboard. The exhibition was unusual, but watching people view these prints was especially interesting. I noticed that everyone got very close to see the images, probably as close as they were comfortable focusing.

We need a new word other than "background" to describe what I want to discuss in today's commentary. We normally think of the background of a photograph as that part that's not the subject but is still inside the borders of the image. But every photograph has another background that is either the mat board of a framed print, or the margins around the image in a book.