Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: concertworks on October 17, 2015, 11:53:22 pm
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Good job Alain. Your final image is well done as is the technique used to realize it. However I think your definitions are somewhat deceptive. With reference to your quote of him I would reply that Aristotle said many things but I believe his greatest emphasis was OBJECTIVITY. A is A, his "Law of Identity".
I make photographs of things I have a particular personal response to, emotional or rational, and am thereby an interpreter. The objective part is that I have recorded a moment in time. The moment; unique, of itself. What I saw, what others may have or will see then or some other time. If I, in a darkroom or on a computer, manipulate a photograph to compensate for contrast, lens flare or other technically deficient aspects I do so only because my eyes see so much more than the camera can record. What I will not do is compromise the moment by the addition or subtraction of anything that was or was not present in that moment. Were I to do so I would then become a photo-renderer. Nothing wrong with that of course but the distinction is clear - to present what was originally a daytime scene as a morning scene is deceptive, even if only I know it. What would your blurb read beside such a print hung in a gallery? Aristotle also wrote that "reality is absolute". Is it?
Do you truly think a documentary photo can't be artistic? Moonrise Over Hernandez for example; what could be more documentary? But it is truly a work of art because Mr. Adams saw the combination of elements, composed, exposed and printed it in such a way as to capture the essence of a moment through his own personal vision. As a b/w picture it's highly interpretive, the printing adds to the impact as well but at its core is the moment.
The debate about what is/is not art is old and boring in its ultimate meaning. I mean, who cares? It's just a label so folk can identify something in a relative manner. For the record, to me, art is any personal act of creativity. Any. But it's moot nonetheless. In your teaching role I would hope you would encourage personal creativity and soft-pedal the art thing. Your collaged image is a good example that of as a goal - to express yourself. Use the tools at your disposal to realize your vision. But honour your subject by trying to capture it's essence in that moment instead of guessing at it at a later date.
I think traditional photography has evolved in a manner adverse to the moment. I used to look at pictures and try to feel the moment. I don't anymore because it seems less important than the "art" of the picture. Shame really.
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I've been thinking about Alain's article and cannot help but think that Alain should call himself a businessman first and artist second. He has created an image depicting a reality that he himself says never will exist and I don't think he has done that so much as an artist, but as a smart photographer who knows what sells.
By further telling us that all of his images are manipulated, it's clear that reality is never good enough for Alain. I'm wondering if it's not good enough because the medium can't capture what the eye sees, or because the artist thinks he can improve on reality or because the businessman knows manipulated images are the ones that sell best.
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I was interested in this article, because I faced similar issues when living (and photographing) in Oman. Where there are abundant canyons that during the golden and blue hours are in the shade. So often I would do a similar thing, just boosted contrast, saturation, and colour, to add a bit more interest and get rid of the washed-out look in the photos. It does not work every time though, especially with strong heat and haze. I was never able to create "art", whatever that means.
I have said it before, over time, I have been reading Alain's articles and admiring his work on the Southwest USA, since his film days. He was an early adopter of digital, I remember a piece he wrote about using a Powershot S50 to quickly scout and register possible locations for later shooting. But I do agree that with time, has he has become a successful photographer, I find his articles more heavy on the "selling" part. Which is fine, he is not tricking anyone or lying about what he does, and about how he manipulates his images.
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Maybe it is my monitor, or my eyesight, or my poor taste. The end result of all the undoubtedly expert postprocessing here looked to me - before I read the text - just plain ugly, and nothing like any sunset I have ever seen. More like something you would find on the lid of a tin of overpriced biscuits. I am wondering if anyone else had a similar "emperor's new clothes" reaction.
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Maybe it is my monitor, or my eyesight, or my poor taste. The end result of all the undoubtedly expert postprocessing here looked to me - before I read the text - just plain ugly, and nothing like any sunset I have ever seen. More like something you would find on the lid of a tin of overpriced biscuits. I am wondering if anyone else had a similar "emperor's new clothes" reaction.
Not to be too argumentative but I don't think that a sunset was the objective - just middle to late afternoon - and in that Alain doesn't do a bad job.
Having lived in an environment that is pretty dry for a lot of the year that sky and the light portrayed is pretty plausible.
Tony Jay
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I think this article should be read in conjuction with the Voice in a Landscape article.
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Feedback appeciated, and I certainly don't want to argue. De gustibus non est disputandum. Your points about late afternoon versus sunset, and dry environments (in which I have also lived), while well made, make no difference at all to my actual response of subtle distaste when I look again at the image. I guess I respond to (what I consider) too much saturation in images in the same way as to (what I consider) too much sugar in food. And I do think that nature can get away with saturation in a way which photographers can't. But, as I implied in my post, that is surely just me. Alain B deserves his high reputation.
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Feedback appeciated, and I certainly don't want to argue. De gustibus non est disputandum. Your points about late afternoon versus sunset, and dry environments (in which I have also lived), while well made, make no difference at all to my actual response of subtle distaste when I look again at the image. I guess I respond to (what I consider) too much saturation in images in the same way as to (what I consider) too much sugar in food. And I do think that nature can get away with saturation in a way which photographers can't. But, as I implied in my post, that is surely just me. Alain B deserves his high reputation.
No issues with the fact that the result doesn't gel with you.
Tony Jay
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Tony,
...I don't think that a sunset was the objective - just middle to late afternoon
How this photograph was made: Grand Canyon Daytime or how to get sunrise / sunset colors in daytime photographs
Having lived in an environment that is pretty dry for a lot of the year that sky and the light portrayed is pretty plausible.
Do you consider the sky in Alain's photo to be compatible with the effect of sunset/sunrise on the land?
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Tony,
Do you consider the sky in Alain's photo to be compatible with the effect of sunset/sunrise on the land?
No.
The angle of the shadows clearly indicates a different time.
Tony Jay
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Don't give a fig for authenticity, don't know what art is, but don't like the effect of the processing. Just one guy's taste.
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Don't give a fig for authenticity, don't know what art is, but don't like the effect of the processing. Just one guy's taste.
A good point!
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It is interesting to read that "saturated but during daylight" is only fit for the lid of a can of sardines but somehow "saturated at dusk" is not?
If I put a polarizer on a lens for a daytime shot and it gets the expected deep blues "out of camera" with no fancy color adjustments, is it therefore not fit for more than the biscuit tin lid?
If an image can be considered attractive because it is saturated, does it matter when it is taken?
And if an artist depends on photography as their business, why shouldn't they develop methods that deliver successful and sustaining images? And if they are successful, why shouldn't they let others know what works for them and helps them succeed?
Seriously... there are a bunch of petty comments here.
I am not sure what comments you are referring to, but if mine, then you haven't read them attentively. I don't personally like what I consider to be an oversaturated look. This, as I made clear, is just my reaction. I wondered if anyone shared it and am interested to discover that someone does, but most don't.
My reaction has nothing to do either with the time of day the image was taken or with the time of day it was intended to reproduce. As I said, my reaction of subtle but unequivocal distaste was unaffected by finding out that the post processing aimed for a late afternoon rather than a sunset look. The image simply looked "wrong" to me. I have no problem with post processing as such, or with your preference for polaroid filters rather than post processing in some circumstances.
As for Alain Briot, I have nothing but respect for his business success and his teaching activities. Surely that was clear from my second post.
Seriously...are you sure your last sentence added value to what, up until then, had been an intelligent discussion?
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dreed,
To compare my emotional reaction to Alain's two images, in the "out of camera", it is "meh, don't care much for it." In the one that is post-processed, it is "cool, I want to be there."
Steel yourself for disappointment.
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No one who has ever stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon has ever been disappointed. Regardless of the light, time of day, or time of year, the scene is simply breathtaking.
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My preference is for images to have color because we live in a world filled with color. Why would I want to look at images that are flat and without life? They rarely inspire me or create any desire... if anything, I want more colors in images because I want them to look alive and feel alive. Why limit yourself to using just that part of the color palette that has unsaturated colors? What a terrible jail to be in!
Fair enough and well said. But then, do you think that more is always better as far as saturation is concerned so that there is no such thing as "oversaturated"? I have no beef with color or with the saturation slider, I just think they need to be used with restraint and taste, and in my perception, AB does not always do this - since first contributing to this thread I have looked at other work by him on line and reacted in the same way, as if to something not quite right because overdone. But, as I have said, that may be just me, plenty of good judges don't seem to feel the same way. It also occurred to me that I might react differently to his images when seen full size as prints. What interests here is the extent to which, and the ways in which, such judgements are subjective.
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I remember looking at Alain's work on the porch of one of the lodges at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. This was many years ago now. I was impressed by what I saw. My daughter bought a print from him; a square format print of a rainbow over the canyon. This was long enough ago it would have all been film and wet darkroom. It was sufficiently saturated. Just the right amount. I'm guessing it might have been shot with Velvia.
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It is all subjective so there is little point in criticising someone else's taste. If someone likes subtly and another garish then so be it.
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It is possible to oversaturate an image, most definitely.
The trick is working out the right saturation for an image.
What's more important: the perspective of judges at a competition or that of customers that pay to own a print and hang in their homes?
Important to whom? I imagine that the customers are in the first instance more important to AB, in a Maslow sense, since they put food on his table. Personally I wouldn't put this print, or any similar one, on my wall at any price, even to cover a particularly nasty stain. I suspect AB is not losing sleep over my opinion, but I would be surprised if, once well-fed, he didn't care at all for the opinion of his peers.
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The posted image was there as an exercise with regards to post processing. It isn't - I haven't seen all of his prints - one of his best and if it had been I suspect it wouldn't need the "treatment" outlined. Alain seems to receive a lot of negative feedback, quite wrongly imo and I hope he isn't discouraged by this thread.
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If Alain's image was in black and white then almost all the "how awful" points raised here would be irrelevant. I wonder what it is about colour that leads people to feel that it must always be true to life. No one (or few) think this of a painting where deep shadow can be rich red, even bright red (Auerbach, e.g.). I usually change the saturation and luminance values in a colour shot I am converting to black and white because the result is closer to what I'm hoping to express, so it's hard to see why not with a full colour image too. I often use Topaz plugins to achieve this effect (sunset, seasonal colours, etc.) because the result is sometimes more pleasing and easier to achieve than faffling around with sliders and layers in ACR and/or Photoshop. It's a lot more difficult to come to terms with the sheer quantity of Yassies out there (yet another saturated sunset) with slo' mo effects et al. Why anyone would want to photograph a sunset ever again is perhaps a bigger question. Maybe I am biased, since I've found Alain's many articles and books helpful in developing my photography and I hope he continues to contribute to LuLa..
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I think a number of people, and not just in this topic, but many other discussions, are stuck trying to differentiate between art and reality. Fine art photography is not documentary photography. Here is an image of a painting by Birger Sandzén, a Paris trained, Swedish immigrant artist who painted with a bold style. Should he have been required to make his paintings conform to absolute reality?
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I wonder what it is about colour that leads people to feel that it must always be true to life.
I don't think that's the issue here - it's that the result is ugly (yes, I know).
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Alain seems to receive a lot of negative feedback, quite wrongly imo and I hope he isn't discouraged by this thread.
I would put that as an expectation rather than a hope. With his track record, he is surely not going to be discouraged by some adverse commentary, giving rise to strong defense, on a LULA thread.
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I think a number of people, and not just in this topic, but many other discussions, are stuck trying to differentiate between art and reality. Fine art photography is not documentary photography. Here is an image of a painting by Birger Sandzén, a Paris trained, Swedish immigrant artist who painted with a bold style. Should he have been required to make his paintings conform to absolute reality?
Interesting and thought-provoking point. In his commentary on the posted image, AB says he is trying to make an image taken at one time of day look as if it was taken at another time of day. That surely rather undermines the relevance of the distinction between art and documentary photography in this case. I have no objection to strong color in painting or photography - would love to own the Birger Sandzén image you posted - and no objection to unrealistic photographs (eg, B&W, monochrome, selectively colored, desaturated, saturated, all totally unrealistic but potentially having artistic/emotional impact). On reflection - stimulated by your post - what makes me queasy about the image under discussion is twofold - that its combination of colors is artistically/emotionally subtly unpleasant (artistic issue), and that it fails in the stated objective of depicting how the light looks at a particular time of day (documentary issue). The first is my main objection - if I liked the image I wouldn't care about its relation to absolute reality (whatever that might be).
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I wonder what it is about colour that leads people to feel that it must always be true to life.
That would certainly be a mistake. The point is surely that combinations of colors can be emotionally and artistically coherent and persuasive, or not, whatever the degree of saturation. Just like combinations of sounds, or tastes.
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That surely rather undermines the relevance of the distinction between art and documentary photography in this case.
I interpret everything Alain writes through the filter of his artist's statement.
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Where can I view the photo being discussed?
Thanks.
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earlybird,
Where can I view the photo being discussed?
Here (https://luminous-landscape.com/how-this-photograph-was-made-grand-canyon-daytime/).
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Thank you.
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I think Alain, by popping the colors, may have damaged the sense of vast distances, here, and thus damaged the sense of scale, of bigness.
And since that's kind of the point, I find myself doubtful about the whole enterprise.
Looking at it big, and/or in a print, might restore the sense of distance, I don't know, obviously.
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The real message here is that we have the tools to essentially make any photograph we take look however we want it to.
We certainly have the tools to try. And someone may have automated it. Is there a "sunset look" plugin for lightroom? If not, there probably soon will be. We may or may not succeed in producing something that looks good, or looks right.
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Or rather that *YOU* think that it is ugly.
That's sort of what I implied, no?
IMHO, there's a lot of merit to this article and what it says.
On average, there are 12 hours of daylight per day yet photographers seems to have convinced themselves that only close to sunrise and sunset is it an appropriate time of day to take photographs that are "beautiful." It's great to see a case being put forward about how to use those other 10-11 hours of the day to be productive shooting photographs.
As Alain points out in his essay, at close to sunset there are light quality issues throughout the canyon, so if you want valleys lit with sunlight then you're pretty much forced to shoot mid afternoon, etc. The same is true for many other real world situations - if you want to get sunlight on a specific subject, you may be forced to shoot it well away from sunrise/sunset. Of course the photographer could give up on shooting said subject because "it doesn't get good light during the golden hour" or grow a pair and work out how to make it work (both with tools in the field and at home in post processing) at other times of day.
The real message here is that we have the tools to essentially make any photograph we take look however we want it to.
Indeed - and with great power comes great responsibility, or for Alain's benefit "Ils doivent envisager qu’une grande responsabilité est la suite inséparable d’un grand pouvoir."
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IMHO, there's a lot of merit to this article and what it says.
On average, there are 12 hours of daylight per day yet photographers seems to have convinced themselves that only close to sunrise and sunset is it an appropriate time of day to take photographs that are "beautiful." It's great to see a case being put forward about how to use those other 10-11 hours of the day to be productive shooting photographs.
As Alain points out in his essay, at close to sunset there are light quality issues throughout the canyon, so if you want valleys lit with sunlight then you're pretty much forced to shoot mid afternoon, etc. The same is true for many other real world situations - ...
The real message here is that we have the tools to essentially make any photograph we take look however we want it to.
+1, I too see the merits of the article and what it tries to achieve,
however, referring to the image editing approach and the intensive use of the Selective Color tool, there might be some risk to disconnect the different hues, means to violate – as pointed out by others here - what was described as perceptually "coherent and persuasive".
Out of interest I was taking the Jpg from the article into Camera Raw, trying the effect of some sliders vs. the image as it is. To me it seems that the overall tonal contrast is rather low, and also the global saturation does not seem to be unusually exaggerated, but it is indeed some single hues (i.e. Red and Blue) which were quite heavily pushed to emphasize the color contrast.
Nothing wrong with it, but then it is probably the nature of every particular processing style/look that some will like it, and others not.
Peter
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Nothing wrong with it, but then it is probably the nature of every particular processing style/look that some will like it, and others not.
Peter
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Right, some people add color, some take it, (what is pretty surreal too). What you like is a different question, and probably what you do yourself. In a couple of decades we will probably also know if it was art...
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Not really - your comment read more like a statement of fact rather than an opinion. It's missing a qualifier such as "I think", etc.
You need to look again at what I actually wrote which was:
"I don't think that's the issue here - it's that the result is ugly (yes, I know)."
Note the amazing clairvoyance with which I predicted that someone would reply "that's just your opinion". Incredible, eh?
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While I appreciated Alain's article, I'm not a fan of that particular photograph -- over the web and on my monitor, it looks too saturated and sugary-feeling for me.
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Note the amazing clairvoyance with which I predicted that someone would reply "that's just your opinion". Incredible, eh?
Not sure about that. Could have been based on inductive reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning) rather than clairvoyance.
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On average, there are 12 hours of daylight per day yet photographers seems to have convinced themselves that only close to sunrise and sunset is it an appropriate time of day to take photographs that are "beautiful."
Apparently Alain Briot is also convinced that only close to sunrise and sunset are the photographs "beautiful". So he fakes it.
I interpret everything Alain writes through the filter of his artist's statement.
Let's view Alain Briot's art through the filter of his artist's statement, but expect what he writes to stand on it's own.
The real message here is that we have the tools to essentially make any photograph we take look however we want it to.
And if you tell people it's art they might "buy it" !
Brilliant Clean! (http://image.cdn.ispot.tv/ad/7gQB/arm-and-hammer-clean-scentsations-large-6.jpg)
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Brilliant Clean! (http://image.cdn.ispot.tv/ad/7gQB/arm-and-hammer-clean-scentsations-large-6.jpg)
Um... the girl is out of focus. The sky is blotchy with compression artifacts.
Thought you'd want to know.
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Um... the girl is out of focus. The sky is blotchy with compression artifacts.
Thought you'd want to know.
Um… a screenshot from a TV soap commercial.
Thought that wouldn't need to be explained. Enjoy the colours.
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Um… a screenshot from a TV soap commercial.
Thought that wouldn't need to be explained.
I love the <WHOOSH> of satire as it passes over a guy's head so close it gives him a buzzcut.
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I love the <WHOOSH> of satire as it passes over a guy's head so close it gives him a buzzcut.
As long as you think you said something clever, we're all happy for you.
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Apparently Alain Briot is also convinced that only close to sunrise and sunset are the photographs "beautiful". So he fakes it.
So what exactly makes it a fake for you ?
considering the massive image manipulation which is almost always needed on the way from a flat raw state (scene-referred rendition) to an output-referred pleasing image. Where precisely shall we draw the border line between fake / non-fake ?
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So what exactly makes it a fake for you ?
considering the massive image manipulation which is almost always needed on the way from a flat raw state (scene-referred rendition) to an output-referred pleasing image. Where precisely shall we draw the border line between fake / non-fake ?
Agreed!
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stamper,
Agreed!
Where precisely shall we draw the border line between fake/non-fake?
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Peter,
So what exactly makes it a fake...?
That Alain faked sunrise/sunset colour is not open to debate - this should be obvious from the title alone of the article:
How this photograph was made: Grand Canyon Daytime or how to get sunrise / sunset colors in daytime photographs
dreed,
On average, there are 12 hours of daylight per day yet photographers seems to have convinced themselves that only close to sunrise and sunset is it an appropriate time of day to take photographs that are "beautiful."
From The Best Light (https://luminous-landscape.com/the-best-light/):
What quality of light is for each of us depends on what we want to photograph and what we are looking for. However, traditionally, and when photographing large vistas or the grand landscape, the best light is found at sunrise and at sunset.
Credit: Alain Briot
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Peter,
That Alain faked sunrise/sunset colour is not open to debate - this should be obvious from the title alone of the article:
Well Rob, - should Alain have told us that he was emotionally in sunset mode when taking the photo, so that the final image represents his true perceptioin, and how he saw the scene ? ... something like this, which seems to have become a kind of standard justification, heard too often, whenever an image is accused of looking over-processed or over-saturated.
Seems Alain first and foremost violated the political correct language.
Also, the specific editing approach may have prevented a really good "fake" :)
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All photography is fakery. Three photographers standing besides each other with the same type of camera and lens shooting a landscape press the shutter at the same time. When the final out put is viewed the images from the the three photographers will have different renderings despite the compositions despite being similar. Each photographer will have chosen different settings in the camera. Which of the three images are "real"?
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Peter,
...this...seems to have become a kind of standard justification, heard too often, whenever an image is accused of looking over-processed or over-saturated.
Don't confuse the statement of fact in my previous post with a critique of Alain's photo, the latter of which I have not made public, nor will I.
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The sky seems more blue than it should be at sunset compared to how the land is orange. Maybe it's just me because I knew it was edited.
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The whole 'well, all of photography is artifice and where shall we draw the line anyways? ' argument is entirely facetious.
On the one hand it is factually correct and sometimes interesting. But this is simply cover for its facetiousness.
In this context we're clearly talking about whether something 'looks real' in a general photographic sense. Would most people generally agree that it's a pretty accurate photo, or would most people say that it's not? This isn't a surgically precise line. But it's a workable and useful one. And mostly it is the line under discussion, pretending that it does not exist is an obvious attempt at distraction and misdirection.
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Light at the two ends of the day has more or less two interesting properties.
The first is the low angle which frequently provides photographically useful modeling. As Alan points out, in this case it produces photographically useless modeling.
The second one is color.
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So what exactly makes it a fake for you ?
fwiw Rob B. seems to have understood my comment correctly.
people who don't have the luxury of getting up at 5am or getting home at 10pm
How sad that the hours between sunrise and sunset hold no interest.
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In this context we're clearly talking about whether something 'looks real' in a general photographic sense. Would most people generally agree that it's a pretty accurate photo, or would most people say that it's not? This isn't a surgically precise line. But it's a workable and useful one.
And ?
Shall we call every image a fake which does not meet this criterion i.e. which deviates from 'perceptually realistic' ?
Or, what if Alain had been successful to emulate sunset colors. Not a fake anymore ?
My question was about the definition and usage of the term "fake" here, and what triggers (justifies) it. I think we agree that it is nothing technical.
So far the only suggest differentiator was the title of the article, and maybe in general the title and text surrounding an image. Not convincing – imo.
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dreed,
Traditional photography was done using cameras that didn't have digital sensors and required making physical prints in order to see the result of the shot.
In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular...sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
Credit: Ansel Adams
How many tour groups spend sunrise or sunset at a location for tourists to photograph?
To whom does the decision to join a tour group belong?
Articles like this give people who don't have the luxury of getting up at 5am or getting home at 10pm ideas on how to improve the look of their images and since they have the tools, why shouldn't they be empowered to do so with a few tips?
What others do is a matter for them.
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Much of this discussion involves arguments that are quite common in journalism. There is no way to get "objective" reports from journalists except in the simplest contexts. "Joe Blow is dead" could be considered an objective statement if Joe Blow is in fact dead, but "Joe Blow is dead after a varied and active life" has now strayed from objectivity. This is all rudimentary, high-school-journalism-class stuff. What many, perhaps most, journalists agree upon is that they should strive to make reports as objective as possible, and "fair" as possible, while recognizing that true, theoretical objectivity and fairness is not possible. But you should strive for it, and striving for it usually produces superior reports.
What Alain has done, and what so many people here object to (I believe) is that Alain no longer strives for objectivity or fairness. (And he's not required to.) He apparently strives for sales. This is equivalent to the shows you see on MSNBC (left) and Fox News (right) which are called "journalism" but which take raw information and then re-work it to conform with a previously determined point of view, which the networks apparently hope will draw in viewers who find that viewpoint congenial. Alain's photographs apparently strive to present a commonly accepted, middle-brow version of "beauty" that is marketable, and has little to do with any concept of objectivity or fairness. Other versions of "beauty" may not be as marketable.
But images are just images, and images themselves never lie, because pigment on paper can't talk. The images simply are. The only "right" or "wrong" in all of this is how the images are represented by the people who make them. If Alain calls them "sunset photos of the Grand Canyon" then he's committing an intellectual fraud. If he simply calls them "photos of the Grand Canyon," which they are, then he's not. Not informing a buyer that the colors have been strenuously manipulated would be problematic. If the buyer asks about the colors, then it clearly would be dishonest if you did not say that they had been manipulated.
What about the buyer who walks into a gallery, ooo's and ahh's over a photo, but never asks about details before buying? Well, that would be up to the photographer, but I'd feel a little dishonest if I didn't mention that the photo had been worked -- but that gets into a whole lot of complicated and individual concepts concerning honesty.
All of this is complicated by problems of competence. What do you think about a reporter (or photographer) who strives for objectivity and fairness but is simply incompetent? What about cases when a photograph is heavily manipulated, but really does, in fact, make it more conform to reality (I'm thinking of such things as creating true verticals in a photo, when the raw image shows lens distortions.) I'm running OS X Yosemite, and one of the screen saver options is a photograph of the moon, in the background, with a slice of earth and its atmosphere in the foreground. When that screen-saver came up the other day, I noticed that the moon was not round (the moon is actually an oblate spheroid, and is not truly round, but the variance is so small you can't see it.) I actually measured the variation on the screen, and it's there -- the moon image is wider horizontally than vertically. But where does this variation come in? Is it in the way the pixels are arranged in the monitor, or in the original photo, or was the image stretched to fill the aspect ratio of the iMac? Was it inadvertent, or deliberate, or part of a mechanism? I just don't know. But the image is nice, and I had no trouble recognizing the moon...
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Just to throw something else into the discussion, I've attached two versions of the same photo taken in Grand Canyon Nat. Park in March 2014. The camera was an Olympus E-M1 and the lens was an Oly 75mm. I took the photo during evening "golden light." The first version shows the result of using a standard "daylight" color balance value while in the second I've adjusted the balance to create a look more to my liking. From experience with various color transparency films I might expect to get a warm & saturated look using a daylight balance setting, but that's clearly not the case here. The E-M1's sensor responds to light differently, particularly—in my experience—at higher elevations. Looks to me like there's a greater than typical sensitivity to UV light in play. I noticed this across the board in my pics from this trip…and processed accordingly.
Here's my broader point: processing is processing. I'm all in favor of disclosing it, especially when deception for commercial or polemical reasons could be an issue. Beyond that…have at it. Adhere to whatever standard of "realism" you choose. Go for as lush or as austere a look as you like.
-Dave-
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... people who don't have the luxury of getting up at 5am ...
Luxury?
Jeremy
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Where precisely shall we draw the border line between fake / non-fake ?
What is it that makes manipulate a more palatable term for you?
manipulate -- "to control something or someone to your advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/manipulate)"
Is it that "manipulate" has another meaning, so the speaker can equivocate in a way that "fake" does not allow (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=104754.msg864892#msg864892).
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When I first saw the canyon shot it just screamed 'fake'. The sky does not go with the canyon and to me that is a fail. If he wanted a good sky he should have found one instead of presenting a goofy one. I don't mind shooting day for evening. Late day shots of the canyon usually have too many deep shadows with only the higher parts illuminated. It is a mile deep after all so it is better to get your shot early but then there is all that haze so warmth and sat are needed to counter that. Most landscape shots are manipulated to some degree even if to make them look 'normal' but there is some expectation that landscape images represent nature to some degree and if the image screams 'fake' it is not a success as a photograph of nature even though the 'look' may sell well. To me Alain is an impressionist and we know those sell really well.