Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: laughingbear on April 02, 2015, 03:56:45 am
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Hehehehe, I am sorry, but I could not resist:
Courtesy of "Take a View":
http://www.take-a-view.co.uk (http://www.take-a-view.co.uk)
12th November 2012
The former winning image of the Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards 2012, by David Byrne, was subsequently disqualified due to the extent of digital manipulation used, along with two further images. The book was prepared and printed by the publisher before this announcement was made and therefore the current version of the hardback book on sale contains the disqualified images....
ROFLMAO :D
Good Lord, I am astonished that Mr. Waite did not arrange for some students to cut out by hand the offending pages prior to going on sale, or stamp over it by hand "SKIP PAGE, DISQUALIFIED ARTWORK!"
David Byrne should have raised the price on this piece significantly and straight away into a limited print run. Rare chance to aquire a unique piece of disqualified artwork. What I mean by that is that he could have taken advantage of such potential reputation damage caused by the disqualification and turn that thing around.
;)
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Excellent article from Alain Briot. A few remarks from me.
Competitions have their own rules as in any field.
Fifty five people
I saw fifty five people standing on the top of a wooded ridge. They were of different age, sex, from different countries and different centuries, or millenniums.
Or maybe they were just from the village they were looking at.
As they looked on I climbed the hill to get to them. On the top I looked down and saw the little village sitting in the valley and the countryside. I then asked every one of them about what they exactly saw and we talked in great detail about it. After a few hours they went after their business. When I was alone again I turned and for the last time looked down into the valley.
But the village I saw before wasn’t there. All I saw were fifty five people’s eyes glowing from below back at me. I then looked again. And again, trying to find the village I saw and remembered but the village I found changed forever.
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Of course the photography can be art. Let’s get this out of the way. There are two key facts about art that no one will change. These are often closely related aspects but it is good to keep them separately for this debate.
- Any activity of man can be done as art.
- Anything can be presented as art.
I would say that covers questions regarding art and photography in full.
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As those fifty five people taught me that day there is no reality to record with our own eyes. Let alone with some poor recorder. By the way, what does it actually mean 'recording'? It sounds like using a tape measure kind of activity. I reckon even house can be built using it. Or will downright be necessary for it. But when the house stands the figures and measurements take on a different meaning. When someone fails to distinguish (nature of) mechanical act
its end purpose and implications
and also boundaries of its effects
the limits lie elsewhere.
It is possible that a person with this limited view and perception will not understand other views and will even feel threatened by them in some way or the other views will be causing him discomfort of a sort. That wouldn’t be the first instance when a crucial limitation found within one’s own mental world leads one to apply simplified approaches and definitions vigorously in attempt to contain something that feels unstable, unknown, beyond reach and therefore dangerous.
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So what is art and what is photograph
1) Even photographing everything using a single preset set by someone on some machine without virtually entering the process of the capture can lead to art when done like that - when that sort of connection occurred. Or when presented as art (in which case the connection is inevitable and you may not even be the author - creator). How successful and what is the scope of success in art with all its purity and fallacy is another chapter.
2) Art can also be other approaches that process the photo using wider gamut of available data, capture potential and wide range of tools.
3) Manipulations altering the capture beyond the usual scope and based on the photograph (photography-based Art) then unsurprisingly continue to have its art potential but stop being a photograph.
The manipulations can be deliberately and carefully chosen steps to alter the capture adding one’s own creativity into the process rather than following lines of the capture itself as the critical and overriding guideline. Because of varied taste (and often poor or superficial), skills and the widespread use of the digital capture among the people today it is not always easy to distinguish between deliberate manipulations with a goal in mind and random manipulations caused by pure chance. This area has got quite wide transition zones and is very beneficial when deliberate approaches to processing are shared and disclosures made as a routine part of the practice. As the digital technology mature and establishes more in our lives it is possible to see signs of progress in this respect. It seems to be part of natural process and it is not as complicated as it sounds and photographers can orientate themselves quite easily.
4) Manipulations that extend to moving and merging content of the photo/image and working particular elements in the photo the way that changes basic philosophy of taking photographs demand disclosure and putting the particular work into adequate perspective for others. Anything other can be basically classified as a con.
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Alain Briot: "I assume that this contest was open only to non-manipulated photographs, otherwise why take away his award?"
Ex-winner, 2012: "I have to inform you after a conversation with Charlie Waite I have been disqualified from the Landscape Photographer of the year awards, unfortunately I didn’t read the regulations (http://petapixel.com/2012/11/02/landscape-photographer-of-the-year-2012-stripped-of-title-for-too-much-shoppin/) and certain editing like adding clouds and cloning out small details are not allowed, while I don’t think what I have done to the photo is wrong in any way, I do understand it’s against the regulations so accept the decision whole heartily.
I have never passed off my photographs as record shots and the only reason this has come about has been due to my openness about how and what I do to my images. The changes I made were not major and if you go to the locations you will see everything is there as presented."
Declan O’Neill : "What is extraordinary is that Mr. Byrne should have won such a prestigious title as Landscape Photographer of the Year."
Not really --
[1857-59] "Le Gray innovated by successively printing parts of two negatives onto the same proof: a landscape and the sky of his choice, photographed elsewhere. He applied this technique to his marines in particular, taking advantage of the flat horizon line that eased the joining of two negatives, thereby emphasizing the horizon's presence and strengthening the force of the resultant image. The effect is stunning... The critics sang his praises, and his photographs of the sea were often exhibited and sought after." page 50
Reproducing Reality: Landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s in relation to the paintings of Gustave Courbet, Dominique de Font-Réaulx. (http://books.google.com/books?id=w7SkRSN_PLEC&lpg=PP60&ots=Md7FQJ5VoN&dq=%22a%20landscape%20and%20the%20sky%20of%20his%20choice%2C%20photographed%20elsewhere%22&pg=PP60#v=onepage&q=%22a%20landscape%20and%20the%20sky%20of%20his%20choice,%20photographed%20elsewhere%22&f=false)
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I already noticed color was missing...
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I wonder if stitches would have qualified.
Cheers,
Bernard
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"High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques & stitched panoramas are allowed (http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/step-1-Selecting-your-images.htm) in all categories"
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Well said, Alain. Thank you.
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Although Isaac's link shows the amended post-Byrnegate rules, the terms were already pretty clear and I've always felt his explanation was convenient. Black and white, stitching and HDR are fine in the general categories - compositing isn't. You can develop or correct the photo in Lightroom or Capture One, but if Photoshop is the only way you could produce that result, then it belongs in the separate category for latter-day Rejlanders. Fess up and be judged on that basis.
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I usually do not take part in this discussion as I think that everything has been said, but this opinion asks for a reply. Photography means painting with light and it implies that the sceen pictured is at it has been at the time. The art of the photographer is to choose bw or color, open or closed aperture, short or long exposure time, in and out of focus, short or long lens and finally high or low contrast, which is linked to the aperture off cause. All these parameters have to be applied so the look on paper or screen still matches the real world scene. That's it! Not more! If this is not enough for you to express yourself you have to choose a different medium. Think of Mr Turner! If you excuse your manipulations with the argument that you are an artist and that you are therefore not tighed to the real scene, than you have to create a new word for your products. Pixel painting starts with a photo, but the end product is something different. So you should be honest and not call it photography. Call it pixelpainting, pixpai, pixpaint, pixpo etc..
If you do not make this clear on any of your creations, you are simply lying, because everybody looking at the photograph thinks that the real world scene was as shown.
HDR is inbetween, because no human eye and brain pictures the world in this way. The vast majority of those images look like drawings anyhow, especially bw images. I simply cannot understand that many people have lost the sense for what a photo means to the person looking at it.
I think that because you have to develop your raw files and because of the almost unlimited options you have people have lost contacts to the reality. If you have a slide or a negative in your hand you have the proof and the starting point of your optimisations and you can always compare the outcome with the original.
People like to have this kind of assurance, that they are standing on solid ground. I think this is why people who have grown up with digital photography fall in love with analog (!) once they hold their first negatives or slides in their hands. Those who haven't done this yet, go out and do it at least for two rolls, one in bw and one in color (slide!).
By the way I am using a point and shoot digital to have a camera with me all the time (Lumix LF1). Most of the time I use bw and if color makes thei image I use slide. Scanning is not the biggest fun, but I also do not want to have to develop every image with a raw processor. I admit that I am thinking about the a7s, in part because of this, but mostly because of the high iso, the only real advantage of digital recordings (thank you lula for your review and comments, other reviewers seem to have sunglasses on all the time).
Yours , Graubaer
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The art of the photographer is to choose bw or color, open or closed aperture, short or long exposure time, in and out of focus, short or long lens and finally high or low contrast, which is linked to the aperture off cause. All these parameters have to be applied so the look on paper or screen still matches the real world scene. That's it! Not more!
Just a few things to think about here; what about
- warming/cooling filters or (for digital) white balance adjustment,
- neutral density filters,
- graduated ND filters, and
- soft focus filters?
These are all creative effects that can be done either in-camera at the time of the shot or (with varying degrees of efficacy) after the fact with post-processing (in some cases these could be achieved with either film processing or digital image processing). Do any of these filters/adjustments have more cachet when applied at the time of the shot than when applied after the fact? Or, if they are applied after the fact, is there anything that makes film processing adjustments more "acceptable to the art" than digitally-applied adjustments?
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. The answer to the question what is art ? can be many things. Here is one answer, as said by James Johnson, a friend and student:
What is art to the photographer? For me it is capturing a moment, one that moves me from within. That spirit inside that almost makes you cry that it is so beautiful and captivating. The artist can only see with his heart. The French writer Antoine de St Exupery said in best in “The Little Prince”, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye”. If there is no manipulation, to bring out what is in the heart then it is not art. Anyone can make a snapshot!
And on this statement I will end this essay.
Aren't the last two lines in that statement at least as narrowminded as the article that prompted this essay?
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....All these parameters have to be applied so the look on paper or screen still matches the real world scene. That's it! Not more! If this is not enough for you to express yourself you have to choose a different medium. ....
....HDR is inbetween, because no human eye and brain pictures the world in this way.....
I think different...
for instance:
We have adjusted to BW photos just because in the past just because we had no way we could do color. Otherwise BW photography probably would have been a niche.
But instead we had a tradition of many decades of photography in the past were we all learned to look at BW as real.
Only BW-photographers may see a scene in BW because they want to make a BW photograph and have learned to see in contrast and form rather than in color.
Many (landscape) photographers are not trying to match the realworld - they are looking for something else. Something personal.
The result might be photograph taken in daylight but looking so dark it resembles the night. That would have been accepted in the contest.
Is a 10 minutes exposure resembling something real? Yes i think so, but have never seen it until i look at the photo i have made...
In landscape photography i see nowadays such strong saturated colours you cannot believe your eyes. That is accepted.
I think we are at a point - like we have had with paintings in the past- that digital photography in this case- with all its new possibillities changes the playground in a more radical way.
You can make the rules for a contest, but do not say that these rules divide real photography from fake. They are just rules.
If that cloud was there 10 minutes ago and the photographer put it in his photo - it is not that far from the truth ; there is just some time difference.
After all- we see through our mind- not through our eyes.
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Much to ponder here.
First, please excuse my poor written English. Second, I should declare an interest. I've been a passing acquaintance of David Byrne via a now moribund forum. Also, until very recently, I lived close to the location of his disqualified picture and have photographed there on several occasions. When David announced his win – and prior to disqualification – I warmly congratulated him on his achievement. I knew well the scope and style of his work and had no idea about the competition rules. At the time it felt churlish and mean to point out that his winning picture was obviously (to me) manipulated – my thinking being that it was only my local knowledge that made it so obvious. Then came the disqualification – I had nothing constructive to say – so remained silent.
As to the broader issues discuses in Alain's essay. IMHO most viewers of our work have their expectation conditioned by the wonders of the human vision system. What the human eye sees and what our cameras capture are quite close, but both are very different to that which our vision system shows us. Couple that with the very limited dynamic range of common photographic processes (in comparison with the real world around us) and you might take the view that practically all photographs are necessarily manipulated in some way or another. Thus the problem for competition organisers is where to draw the line for what is and is not acceptable. FWIW I can enjoy the results achieved by combining elements of different images into a single end product, and I much admire the skill and application of the authors – but it is not photography. Rather, it is an art (?) form that uses photographs as a source material.
Art and photography ….. well.... Since we use photography as a means of documenting much of human activity it follows that much (most?) photography cannot be art. Artistic passport photo anyone – I think not. So can photography be art? Lets make the working assumption of “Yes”. IMHO that gives us a bit of a problem since most art (painting drawing some sculpture) is an additive process. One starts with a blank sheet of paper and we then add stuff in. With photography our camera gives us everything – often rather too much – so we embark on a subtractive process to get what we want. Ah, manipulation – again! My current thinking is that photography is most likely to be art when it shows us something that we are unlikely to see from another art form. This might happen in a number of ways, but I'm thinking at the moment that the time domain might be a fruitful place to explore.
Right then, tin foil hat, coat, door.
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… and I've always felt his explanation was convenient.
Of course; otoh over the last month, I've been watching photos accumulate for a local photo competition and it continues to surprise me that many people obviously don' t read the rules.
… latter-day Rejlanders …
That would be a different genre; Le Gray, same genre, same idea.
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Right then, tin foil hat, coat, door.
Pour a cognac and pull the comfy chair closer to log fire :-)
Since we use photography as a means of documenting much of human activity it follows that much (most?) photography cannot be art. Artistic passport photo anyone – I think not.
What do you think we used as a means of documenting human activity before photography? Drawing and painting, so shall we say drawings and paintings cannot be art?
Artistic passport photo? "In an age where kings would make marriage decisions based on the beauty of a portrait (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/apr/27/holbein-engineer-royal-wedding), artists had real political power "
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…you have to create a new word for your products. … So you should be honest and not call it photography.
Words change their meaning over time or become archaic. Each generation makes meanings useful to their lives and will pay no heed to the demand that things should stay the same.
We have adjusted to BW photos just because in the past just because we had no way we could do color. … But instead we had a tradition of many decades of photography in the past were we all learned to look at BW as real.
We also have thousands of years of monochrome drawing and painting.
We also see in monochrome, unless there's enough available light to see in colour.
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Artistic passport photo anyone – I think not.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=thomas+ruff+portraits&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=UNMeVfvVDYKM-gbE6oCwDg
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As to the broader issues discuses in Alain's essay. IMHO most viewers of our work have their expectation conditioned by the wonders of the human vision system. What the human eye sees and what our cameras capture are quite close, but both are very different to that which our vision system shows us. Couple that with the very limited dynamic range of common photographic processes (in comparison with the real world around us) and you might take the view that practically all photographs are necessarily manipulated in some way or another.
+1. As photographers we know that our eyes, brains, and cameras all see differently. But the general public doesn't seem to realize this. Some seem to regard cameras as lie detectors, recorders of absolute truth. People need to be educated on this point, regardless of what our varying opinions of where the line between "optimization" and "manipulation" lies.
Regarding that line, I found it odd that in Mr. O'Neill's essay he states "Removing power lines from a landscape is one thing. Changing the colour of the sky from grey to orange quite another." So he feels that changing the color of the sky to what it might have been at another hour is unforgiveable, but removing a physical object that will be there anytime of day or night is okay??
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Amusingly the question of whether "sky from one shot, land from another" is OK is the basis of a very early feud. PH Emerson and HP Robinson went at it hammer and tongs in the 1880s over pretty much exactly that.
Emerson was right ;)
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PH Emerson and HP Robinson went at it hammer and tongs in the 1880s…
That gives Photoshop an alibi.
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Much to ponder here.
First, please excuse my poor written English. Second, I should declare an interest. I've been a passing acquaintance of David Byrne via a now moribund forum. Also, until very recently, I lived close to the location of his disqualified picture and have photographed there on several occasions. When David announced his win – and prior to disqualification – I warmly congratulated him on his achievement. I knew well the scope and style of his work and had no idea about the competition rules. At the time it felt churlish and mean to point out that his winning picture was obviously (to me) manipulated – my thinking being that it was only my local knowledge that made it so obvious. Then came the disqualification – I had nothing constructive to say – so remained silent.
As to the broader issues discuses in Alain's essay. IMHO most viewers of our work have their expectation conditioned by the wonders of the human vision system. What the human eye sees and what our cameras capture are quite close, but both are very different to that which our vision system shows us. Couple that with the very limited dynamic range of common photographic processes (in comparison with the real world around us) and you might take the view that practically all photographs are necessarily manipulated in some way or another. Thus the problem for competition organisers is where to draw the line for what is and is not acceptable. FWIW I can enjoy the results achieved by combining elements of different images into a single end product, and I much admire the skill and application of the authors – but it is not photography. Rather, it is an art (?) form that uses photographs as a source material.
Art and photography ….. well.... Since we use photography as a means of documenting much of human activity it follows that much (most?) photography cannot be art. Artistic passport photo anyone – I think not. So can photography be art? Lets make the working assumption of “Yes”. IMHO that gives us a bit of a problem since most art (painting drawing some sculpture) is an additive process. One starts with a blank sheet of paper and we then add stuff in. With photography our camera gives us everything – often rather too much – so we embark on a subtractive process to get what we want. Ah, manipulation – again! My current thinking is that photography is most likely to be art when it shows us something that we are unlikely to see from another art form. This might happen in a number of ways, but I'm thinking at the moment that the time domain might be a fruitful place to explore.
Right then, tin foil hat, coat, door.
While I agree entirely that photography, as a potential artistic endeavour, is different from other accepted artistic endeavours in that it is actually a, largely, subtractive process whereas the others disciplines are, mostly, an additive process in this way, at least, they are absolutely consistent:
What makes art art is that it is an interpretive process.
Trying to portray photography as a purely documentary exercise is bound to failure.
Merely by choosing what to shoot, and what not to shoot, never mind choosing a certain time of day over another, constitutes interpretive intent.
Also, whenever we look at an image, whether it is labelled art or document, an interpretive process occurs as we assimilate that image. It is often assumed that everyone will interpret a "documentary" image in the same way but that is most assuredly not so.
As soon as post-processing is superimposed on an image even the most subtle alterations may induce profound changes in how that image is perceived.
Art is perception and perception is art and we all perceive differently.
I recently posted an image of a lion lying up in an area of bush but brilliantly lit by late afternoon sun.
Everyone viewing this image "grokked" these documentary facts.
However the perception of this image was largely negative, but there was a significant minority that really liked the image.
The image succeeded at an artistic level merely because it excited diverse interpretive conclusions (although it is doubtful that it would succeed at a commercial level).
None of us appear able to view any imagery without invoking an interpretive effort - this appears to be "hard-wired" within our brains. In addition this interpretation also appears to invoke pleasure (this occurs whether we "like" the imagery or not).
The bottom line is that the debate should not really be about whether some imagery is art or not but rather whether it is any good!
Tony Jay
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It's sort of sad to see this argument dusted off again, by people so relatively thoughtless.
Emerson's point, basically, is that nature gets it right and it's your job to not botch it up again. It's a philosophical point, ultimately. But there is a practical aspect to it, which is that you're never going to get the light and perspective correct. And a quick glance at the disqualified photo shows that, in fact, the light seems, if not outright *wrong*, at least unlikely. This is not to suggest that "anyone can see that it's 'shopped" far from it. I've seen the photo before and didn't think that. It does look surreal, though, an effect probably enhanced by the wrongness of the light.
Emerson even goes so far as to allow that you might composite in clouds, as long as they're shot at the same time from the same place -- so you get the light and perspective correct. He advocates, to be quite precise, HDR techniques. In 1890.
Robinson's point is that as long as it is true to the scene, who cares where the clouds come from? Emerson's counter point is, roughly, "You are a ham-fisted idiot and any fool can see that the clouds are not in fact true to the scene" and so on.
They were both much more fun to read, and far more erudite and thoughtful about these things.
ETA: It's not clear at all to me why Alan is responding to an essay that is more than 2 years old..
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But there is a practical aspect to it, which is that you're never going to get the light and perspective correct.
Without compositing, without PS, without HDR: the "standard" adjustments in LR are enough to make the light "not correct" -- in a way that can make compositing seem quite benign.
Shouldn't judgement wait until we see what they managed to achieve with light and perspective?
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This all boils down to: RTFR if you enter competitions.
The rest - modify, don't modify, composite, don't composite - those are aesthetic choices if the photo is for purposes of art and not straight documentation. Heck, in macro I frequently pull out of view an interfering leaf or branch - and that's before the electrons actually hit the sensor.
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Argument over which manipulations are OK and which are not are literally as old as photography, and generally are fairly arbitrary. This is the closest I have been able to come to summarizing the truth:
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
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There is only one person who can define whether something is art: the creator. Art is defined by intent. The passport photo example is not art because (usually) the creator is not producing that photo with artistic intent.
BTW, sculpture is a subtractive process. What was that phrase, "I just remove everything that isn't David"...?
My early mentor was Galen Rowell. He was pretty strict when it came to this stuff. I've decided for myself that the degree of manipulation is a personal decision, and no decision is right or wrong. Nor can it be applied to anyone else.
It took me a while to warm up to stitching two images together into a pano or focus-stacked composite. There was something about the single captured "event" that was important to me. But hey, from a physics point of view there are billions of events in a single photograph, so what's the big deal? These days I will stitch to my hearts content by shifting the digital back on my tech camera. It converts my fixed 60mm into a really good 30mm lens too! So I look at it as Sustainable Photography: I'm doing more with less. :P
Dave
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This all boils down to: RTFR if you enter competitions.
The rest - modify, don't modify, composite, don't composite - those are aesthetic choices if the photo is for purposes of art and not straight documentation. Heck, in macro I frequently pull out of view an interfering leaf or branch - and that's before the electrons actually hit the sensor.
This is basically what I was gonna write. :)
As for Galen Rowell, I wonder if he would've maintained his no modification stance had he lived long enough to fully engage with electronic photography & digital processing. He wasn't averse to tweaking scanned transparencies to improve tonality (or, pre-scanning, re-photographing underexposed trannies to pull out more shadow detail).
-Dave-
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As for Galen Rowell, I wonder if he would've maintained his no modification stance had he lived long enough to fully engage with electronic photography & digital processing. He wasn't averse to tweaking scanned transparencies to improve tonality (or, pre-scanning, re-photographing underexposed trannies to pull out more shadow detail).
-Dave-
I agree. I often wonder the same thing. Personally, I think he would have embraced digital revolution and adjusted his views as necessary to get the best results. At the end of the day I found him to be quite pragmatic. It sure would be fun to see him use the tools we have today.
Dave
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I agree. I often wonder the same thing. Personally, I think he would have embraced digital revolution and adjusted his views as necessary to get the best results. At the end of the day I found him to be quite pragmatic. It sure would be fun to see him use the tools we have today.
Dave
Particularly if it actually enhanced the reality of what was being shot.
Tony Jay
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Everybody who looks at a photo automatically assumes, that this images shows the scene as it was and not how it possibly could have been. Imagine all those manipulated photos would carry a label: this image does not show the scene as it has been. It has been manipulated so it resembles a situation that might appear sometime, or not at all. I bet that photos with such a label would not draw as much attention as they would without it.
It just takes the fun out of looking at landscape photos, when I first have to scan the image to find out whether it is a real photo or some kind of modern Caspar-David Friederich or Turner. I am not against post-image recording processing, but this discussion just demonstrates that people have not drawn a clear line, or do not even want to draw one (!), were a photo ends and a digital painting starts. That's all what I wish to see eventually, to separate the 'image hunter' from the 'image creator'.
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The trouble is that there is no clear line between the things. All distinctions are arbitrary. All photos are manipulated.
Having holy wars over whether the line should be drawn here or there is stupid. Albeit great fun.
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Everybody who looks at a photo automatically assumes, that this images shows the scene as it was and not how it possibly could have been. Imagine all those manipulated photos would carry a label: this image does not show the scene as it has been. It has been manipulated so it resembles a situation that might appear sometime, or not at all.
Which side of the line will you put Monolith, the Face of Half Dome (http://www.johnsexton.com/newsletter04-2012.html)?
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Which side of the line will you put Monolith, the Face of Half Dome (http://www.johnsexton.com/newsletter04-2012.html)?
It's black-and-white, so of course it doesn't show the scene "as it was seen". The very existence of monochrome photography illustrates perfectly the utter pointlessness of this whole discussion.
Jeremy
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It's black-and-white, so of course it doesn't show the scene "as it was seen". The very existence of monochrome photography illustrates perfectly the utter pointlessness of this whole discussion.
Jeremy
Thank you, Jeremy.
Before I saw your post, I was about to write that henceforth I might need to add a disclaimer to all of my B&W images:
"Warning! The original scene did NOT look like this. In fact, the original scene had numerous colors."
(or colours, if you prefer).
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...and having put in their 2 cents worth I'll warrant Jeremy and Eric will put this thread out of mind, take out their cameras and go to do whatever makes them happy on the day. I think I'll join them.
David
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Presumably David and Jeremy and Eric are indulging in a comic interlude to draw attention away from the dramatic darkening of the sky in-rejection of literal interpretation ;-)
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This is the closest I have been able to come to summarizing the truth:
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
That is to conflate what some arbitrary camera records with reality (whatever that means).
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Argument over which manipulations are OK and which are not are literally as old as photography, and generally are fairly arbitrary. This is the closest I have been able to come to summarizing the truth:
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
I would agree, and this may be one of the best summaries I've seen of the problem (or opportunity) of manipulation.
The underlying idea is that a machine has been created that will take the best possible representation of reality, within certain limits defined by other machines (lenses, shutters, sensors, etc.) That range is easily grasped by most people. What isn't easily grasped by most people is the subtle manipulation that changes something that implicitly professes to be a machine representation of reality, to something that isn't. In most human transactions, doing that would simply be called lying. I have no problem with heavily manipulated photographs in which the manipulation is obvious; in those cases, it's clear that the photo is a starting point for something else. When newspapers do that, they call the result a "photo illustration" to tell you that you're not seeing a photo of the actual subject. What I object to is photos (like most manipulated landscape photos) that *might* be real, but are not, and don't explicitly tell the viewer that the view is not real.
That's why Isaac's references to painting and drawings fail. Nobody ever took those as actual representations of reality; John Singer Sargent, one of the best portraitists in history, once said that "A portrait is a picture in which there is something not quite right about the mouth." Nobody ever thought that paintings, or sculptors, were doing what photography has claimed to do; paintings, including the most realistic, have always been constructed, rather than "taken."
The core of this dispute seems to me not to involve much about photography at all, but rather, to consider the question of whether photographers should lie. If you heavily manipulate a photo, to look in any way non-realistic, and somebody wants to buy it, well, god bless them. If you subtly manipulate a photo portrait, to make the sitter look better and that's what the sitter wants, I have no problem with that, either; the sitter is the client and is paying for the work. But if you subtly manipulate a photo of what most people would take to be an aspect of reality (a landscape, for instance) and sell it to them as that, then you're committing a fraud. That's quite clear in such areas as photojournalism -- if a photojournalist did what AB advocates, he/she would be fired. I'm suggesting that in subtly manipulated photos, you ARE representing them as a kind of photojournalism, as documentary, and by not specifically admitting the manipulation, you are lying.
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Nobody ever thought that paintings, or sculptors, were doing what photography has claimed to do; paintings, including the most realistic, have always been constructed, rather than "taken."
Obviously, people have very much expected paintings to provide a likeness (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/apr/27/holbein-engineer-royal-wedding).
Obviously, photographs are also constructed.
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... The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
Good job, Andrew!
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What is the aspect ratio of reality?
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He had increased contrast by using a red filter, so the scene or the light has not been changed. No clouds copied in, no selective greyscale changes on parts of the image, just during paper exposure selective exposure time. No tens of layers, each with selective manipulations. All those changes apply essentially to the entire image. Compare it with what have been seen on the lula pages, like this ocean scene (australia?), where a person has been copied in, because actually noboday wanted to stand there, or this river bed in which dramatic early morning sun light has been copied in. The difference between half dome, in which only contrasts of been adjusted, on those are obvious to me. There is a difference between adjustments made to overcome the limits of the negative and paper etc. and those which just creates situation, which didn't exist.
Drawing clear lines always has something arbitrary, but that doesn't makes them obsolete. Think of state borders, official languages etc.. They are arbitrary, but have been made for good reasons. Using color filters in color analog photography is also a manipulation, but it has it limits and can enhance color to properly translate the real lighting situation on film and paper. If you create a colorful sunset, which hasn't been colorful at all, it is a manipulation which goes too far.
This is where painting starts.
One has to discriminate between techniques, which help to translate a situation, with which one tries to overcome the limits of the techniques and those which create something, which has only been in the mind of the creator of the image.
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I am not against post-image recording processing, but this discussion just demonstrates that people have not drawn a clear line, or do not even want to draw one (!), were a photo ends and a digital painting starts. That's all what I wish to see eventually, to separate the 'image hunter' from the 'image creator'.
To see better about the lines of others one needs to draw one for oneself first.
Such a line then, if it is to work at all, is drawn every second. The ruler is your heart, the ink your conscience and the style your consistency. Unless one moves into this space he/she will keep looking for unseen and unrecognisable. Once in that space, one can see that the character of that line is always directly depending on individual motivation. That is the real core of this debate. As it is the person’s individual motivation with which he/she take photographs that sets the stage for involvement of the abstract, yet the most real, qualities mentioned above.
I suppose the fact that most people struggle to have motivation clearly defined to themselves when it comes to their photography explains the ambiguities surrounding manipulation vs processing (optimisation) in photography and the related topics.
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The trouble is that there is no clear line between the things. All distinctions are arbitrary. All photos are manipulated.
Having holy wars over whether the line should be drawn here or there is stupid. Albeit great fun.
Yes, that is truth.
All photos or any other records are manipulated and always will be.
Any visual representation - any - is and will be representing the real only within constraints of the means used (technology, physical laws). To be clear, there always will be these constraints. Debate here is only about what approximations in relation to reality people might prefer.
(Then there is wider question and topics regarding our visual perception.)
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+1. As photographers we know that our eyes, brains, and cameras all see differently. But the general public doesn't seem to realize this. Some seem to regard cameras as lie detectors, recorders of absolute truth. People need to be educated on this point, regardless of what our varying opinions of where the line between "optimization" and "manipulation" lies.
Regarding that line, I found it odd that in Mr. O'Neill's essay he states "Removing power lines from a landscape is one thing. Changing the colour of the sky from grey to orange quite another." So he feels that changing the color of the sky to what it might have been at another hour is unforgiveable, but removing a physical object that will be there anytime of day or night is okay??
+2
One thing, on the difference, though. O’Neill's approach suggests that he has got clear guidelines based on his philosophy. That very likely grows from the motivation that makes him engage in photography (I know nothing about his photography). That view also makes his rules seem more alive rather than a lifeless dogma. And a dogma will get us nowhere sensibly.
For this concrete case of the power lines and the sky there is one difference. No person made the sky grey or put it there. Unlike with the power lines that were put there (an hour ago?). And considering this difference it can become a key difference in many instances.
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It is not about reality, but about our visual reality. A photo cannot show the reality, at one of the reasons is that you go from 3d to 2d and in fact this translation is part of the challenge of photography, and fun. How to translate space in a 2d image?
The kind of frame you put around things, doesn't change the thing. It is an important aspect of photography, because it influences the way we look at an image.
Taking a photo is of cause a translation and interpretation of a scene, that's why we take it, don't we? You show it the way you saw it, but you won't see a sunset when there wasn't one, unless you are on drugs.
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Distinctions between 'this only translates, enhances' while that 'alters, creates' are bogus. What they mean is 'what I do is OK and what you do is not'. That is why they always feel tortured.
The artifice begins with the frame. Reality has no aspect ratio.
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about the reality of a photograph...
I have met some persons living in the Sahara that could not read a normal landscape colorprint. They just did not see anything in it.
We all have learned to see things and give meaning to it. The 'reality' we see in a photograph is a learned interpretation.
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He had increased contrast by using a red filter, so the scene or the light has not been changed. No clouds copied in, no selective greyscale changes on parts of the image, just during paper exposure selective exposure time.
Contrast was not increased uninformly; contrast was increased selectively to achieve a dramatic effect rather than a literal record.
"Monolith, The Face of Half Dome. ... I realized after exposing that the image would not express the particular mood of overwhelming grandeur the scene evoked. I visualized a dark sky, deeper shadows, and a crisp horizon in the distance.
With my one remaining plate I used the #29 dark red filter, achieving very much the effect I wanted."
The Negative, Ansel Adams, page 5
Anybody "who looks at a photo automatically assumes, that this images shows the scene as it was and not how it possibly could have been" would do better to not "automatically assume", because they are likely to misunderstand what they are looking at.
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It's funny. While I lean philosophically toward the "anything goes" approach to photography, this is mainly the result of understanding that vision is itself massively subjective and interpretive. But when it comes to what I actually do in practice…I use a very light touch in Photoshop, Iridient, etc. I'm interested in documenting found moments rather than creating idealized or imaginative moments. The important thing is to realize & acknowledge the arbitrary nature of such interests & choices.
-Dave-
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Tony,
The bottom line is that the debate should not really be about whether some imagery is art or not but rather whether it is any good!
Given that "good" is subjective, what positive outcome(s) will be returned from such a debate?
Andrew,
...you're never going to get the light and perspective correct.
Why?
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
The logical conclusion from the above is that manipulation should not be carried out at all.
Dave,
As for Galen Rowell, I wonder if he would've maintained his no modification stance...
Galen Rowell used graduated filters.
Isaac,
...photographs are...constructed.
Absolutely.
David,
What is the aspect ratio of reality?
3:1
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Are you quite sure? Why not square? Or 16:9? It seems to me that by constraining reality to a square or some type of rectangle, it is no longer reality since some part of reality has to remain on the outside.
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David,
It was a joke.
Having said that, our (relatively) in-focus field of view approximates to a horizontal ellipse, when our eyes are stationary.
It seems to me that by constraining reality to a square or some type of rectangle, it is no longer reality since some part of reality has to remain on the outside.
We see with our eyes only that which falls within our field of view. Does everything outside of it not exist as a part of reality?
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Are you quite sure? Why not square? Or 16:9?
His panos are 3:1 ;-)
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The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
The logical conclusion from the above is that manipulation should not be carried out at all.
No. If I say "sausages cost money" the correct conclusion is not "one should not eat sausages".
The sacrifices, anyways, begin immediately. The moment you press the shutter button you are manipulating. The point is that one should not manipulate without getting something back of value. I don't care, and I do not believe that it matters in the slightest, what kinds of manipulation one performs. Arguing that curves adjustments are OK but cloning is not, or vice versa, is a waste of energy.
Cloning that thing out, though, costs you. Is it worth it? Making the curves adjustment costs you. It is worth it? And so on.
Depending on what you are doing, the costs may be larger or smaller. In some cases, cropping may exact a tremendous cost, in others it may be free. Hence, that particular never-ending debate.
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In this case, what do you mean by "its reality"?
Its indexicality
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Galen Rowell used graduated filters.
Well, yeah. But the context here is post-exposure modification…which Rowell also did (or allowed to be done) but only in the limited tonality-oriented ways I've previously mentioned.
-Dave-
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I think a good guideline might be: - will it stand up as evidence in a court of law? Since a photo normally represents reality, at least to the viewer, barring any comment about manipulation by the shooter deceives the viewer. The NY Times and other publications of "standards" insist that photos may be cropped, and their lighting adjusted. But they insist that no object be cloned in or removed. The BW photo is a straw man argument because the viewer accepts that the original scene was in color. The viewer is not fooled as to the original content or hue.
I'm not arguing that photos cannot be manipulated to a scene different than what was shot. It's just that photography still has a belief aura that it represents reality to the viewer and if not the viewer should be made aware of this fact.
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I think a good guideline might be: - will it stand up as evidence in a court of law? Since a photo normally represents reality, at least to the viewer, barring any comment about manipulation by the shooter deceives the viewer. The NY Times and other publications of "standards" insist that photos may be cropped, and their lighting adjusted. But they insist that no object be cloned in or removed. The BW photo is a straw man argument because the viewer accepts that the original scene was in color. The viewer is not fooled as to the original content or hue.
I'm not arguing that photos cannot be manipulated to a scene different than what was shot. It's just that photography still has a belief aura that it represents reality to the viewer and if not the viewer should be made aware of this fact.
Actually a photograph never represents reality.
It may, or may not, be an acceptable representation of someones definition of reality but a photograph, in absolute terms, it is not reality.
This is much more than semantics because misunderstanding this issue is actually fuelling a lot of debates.
IMHO post-processing manipulation may actually enhance the reality of an image despite the fact that pixels may be bent.
Assuming a camera, and its sensor, is the ultimate arbitrator of reality is just way off the mark.
Tony Jay
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...misunderstanding this issue is actually fuelling a lot of debates...
Well, Tony, debates are there not because the other side misunderstood something, but because the other side (myself included) has a different opinion. Otherwise, you seem to claim the "truth" for yourself, and misunderstanding for those who disagree.
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Journalistic standards are, to be blunt, a sham intended to create the impression of objectivity. You can lie with a crop, or by selecting one picture instead of another, as effectively and more easily than with the clone tool. And all to often our news organizations do.
It's all artifice.
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Journalistic standards are, to be blunt, a sham intended to create the impression of objectivity. You can lie with a crop, or by selecting one picture instead of another, as effectively and more easily than with the clone tool. And all to often our news organizations do.
It's all artifice.
It's not photography, but it's journalism. Look at the tempest today over the flimsy and false reporting in the Rolling Stone on the campus rape story. Heads should roll over that deal, but they've already announced no one will be fired and the writer will continue to write for the magazine. They based their entire reporting on one person's interview who turned out to be creating a complete work of fiction.
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David,
It was a joke.
Having said that, our (relatively) in-focus field of view approximates to a horizontal ellipse, when our eyes are stationary.
We see with our eyes only that which falls within our field of view. Does everything outside of it not exist as a part of reality?
I know you were joking, and I was joking, in a way, in return. I was using a deadpan question and my response to your answer to make a point.
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Actually a photograph never represents reality.
It may, or may not, be an acceptable representation of someones definition of reality but a photograph, in absolute terms, it is not reality.
This is much more than semantics because misunderstanding this issue is actually fuelling a lot of debates.
IMHO post-processing manipulation may actually enhance the reality of an image despite the fact that pixels may be bent.
Assuming a camera, and its sensor, is the ultimate arbitrator of reality is just way off the mark.
Tell that to the judge.
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Well, Tony, debates are there not because the other side misunderstood something, but because the other side (myself included) has a different opinion. Otherwise, you seem to claim the "truth" for yourself, and misunderstanding for those who disagree.
So Slobodan, when I set my camera up with neutral-density filters and take a ten or fifteen second shot of a waterfall to smooth out the flow into something ethereal doing this goes way, way beyond what a human is capable of experiencing unassisted.
This "reality" cannot be realised by the human eye.
If you believe, having seen a beautiful photograph of a waterfall shot in this way, if you travel to the location of that waterfall expecting to see what you saw in that photograph you will be mightily disappointed.
However, if we understand that the appearance of the waterfall in the photograph is an abstraction of the flow of water over the waterfall then there is no problem.
As soon as that photograph is interpreted as a literal reality problems arise.
There is certainly no need invoke post-processing as an evil that can introduce "unreality" when we can use our cameras so easily to produce the same result.
BTW I think if anyone is taking binary position on this Slobodan it may be you.
You certainly want to push me into the polar opposite of your thinking.
Tony Jay
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But quite apart from the integrity of the NYT or whatever.
The point is that saying 'we crop but don't adjust color or clone' sounds like 'our photos are incapable of not being truthful' and that is incorrect. You can lie with a crop just fine.
Eliminating this tool but permitting that one is a silly, arbitrary game.
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Tell that to the judge.
Ever heard of a miscarriage of justice?
Tony Jay
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Andrew: Most things are a matter of degree. It's often in the eye of the beholder. But cropping out the other photographer shooting nearby so the scene looks beautiful is one thing. And swapping out the sky in one picture and inserting into a second is another thing. Most people, layman in particular, would agree with this concept. After all,they are the viewer of the photo. They don't like being fooled.
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Yes. Sometimes the crop costs little and sometimes it costs a lot. That's my earlier point.
The costs in terms of truth or reality or whatever have little to do with the particular tool.
Thus, arguing about which tools are 'ok' is a distraction at best.
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Andrew,
No.
Yes.
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
As your text currently stands, no allowance exists for manipulation to enhance reality, only for it to reduce the power of a photograph by sacrificing a part of its reality. The logical conclusion from "make your sacrifices count" is therefore to make fewer, smaller sacrifices (manipulations) or, taken to the limit, for manipulation to be not carried out at all.
In some cases, cropping may exact a tremendous cost...
Given that the decision to crop rests with the photographer, how will a cost be incurred?
You can lie with a crop...
Please can you explain/provide an example?
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There is a famous photograph which I regret I cannot find.
There are, I think, three soldiers standing and a fourth person on the ground. Cropped down to two soldiers it appears they are holding the fourth person prisoner in a threatening way. Cropped to another grouping it appears they are ministering to the fourth person.
As I recall the three soldiers are ministering (giving water? Tending injuries?) And there is an accidental alignment of a rifle.
ETA: Two soldiers, actually. I found the picture.
But you surely didn't actually need me to provide an example. I think you're nitpicking to try to make me jump through hoops.
As for my other remarks, you are choosing silly interpretations. If instead you assume that perhaps I am not a moron, you'll have better luck understanding them.
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Andrew,
I assume your previous post is addressed to me.
...you surely didn't actually need me to provide an example. I think you're nitpicking to try to make me jump through hoops.
You are mistaken on both counts. First, I was interested in understanding how a crop could be considered to lie. Second, I have no interest in making others "jump through hoops".
If instead you assume that perhaps I am not a moron, you'll have better luck understanding them.
I do not consider you to be a moron.
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Rob at the risk of inflaming things - which isn't my intention - you have a posting "style" that comes across as irksome. I am not against quoting people's words but you tend to take them out of context and "demand" answers. Do you work in management? A technique I have come across in my working days.
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The pinnacle of forum debates. The argument to end all arguments:
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stamper,
...at the risk of inflaming things - which isn't my intention...
There is no risk - no offense taken.
This thread is not about me. Let us not turn it into one.
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If you're going to make the logical leap that "X has a cost" to "you should avoid the use of X (entirely/as much as possible)" then I honestly have no idea what to say. There's some kind of fundamental disconnect. Replace X with "sausages" and think it through. As I have already once suggested you do.
Perhaps you're trying to figure out which side of the "photoshop is great"/"photoshop is evil" false dichotomy I am on? I'm not talking in code. The dichotomy is, in my opinion, false, and I am on neither side of it.
All this is implicit, I even dare say clear, in the original statement: Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
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There is a famous photograph which I regret I cannot find.
There are, I think, three soldiers standing and a fourth person on the ground. Cropped down to two soldiers it appears they are holding the fourth person prisoner in a threatening way. Cropped to another grouping it appears they are ministering to the fourth person.
As I recall the three soldiers are ministering (giving water? Tending injuries?) And there is an accidental alignment of a rifle.... [/i]
If the picture is cropped to show anything but what really happened, then it is a lie. If the photographer deliberately did that to make his political point, and he worked for the NY Times, he would be fired, and rightly so. The photographer does not have license to crop or change the truth of what actually happened in my opinion. It is incumbent on him, if he has his ethics in the right place, to not change the photo to deceive the viewer.
In another related situation, a photo could be telling the truth. But the caption could be saying something that was not the truth about what the photo captured. I'm reminded of that photo showing a polar bear swimming in the Arctic Ocean, with little ice floating around him. The caption says global warming is destroying the bear's environment (which may or may not be the truth-not for my point). But the truth about the photo is that polar bears often swim in the ocean, in fact great distances and have been doing that long before man burned fossil fuels. The photo depicts a true scene. The caption was written to make a political point and falsely describes what actually is happening.
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But all crops lie, to one degree or another. Nothing exists or happens in isolation. By selecting a frame, you choose a subset of the world, you isolate it, and present it as a thing in and of itself.
Sometimes the falsehood is very very small, as you have selected some collection of things relies very little on the rest of the world for meaning. Sometimes it is very very big.
There are always matters of degree. The cost, in terms how much of reality you have sacrificed varies, of course. But virtually everything we do as we make photographs chips away at that reality, one way or another, to one degree or another. You can't measure it. beyond "a lot" and "not very much," you can only apply your best judgement. Pay whatever price is necessary to say what you need to say. Sometimes you pay a high price (Gurksy) and hope that it's worth it. Sometimes you pay a lower price (Evans).
Who's "right"? Who's "wrong"? These are not questions that even make sense.
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If the picture is cropped to show anything but what really happened, then it is a lie. If the photographer deliberately did that to make his political point, and he worked for the NY Times, he would be fired, and rightly so. The photographer does not have license to crop or change the truth of what actually happened in my opinion. It is incumbent on him, if he has his ethics in the right place, to not change the photo to deceive the viewer.
Explain to me how it is different to crop a picture vs use a different zoom setting and why one would result in a person being fired and the other not.
In another related situation, a photo could be telling the truth. But the caption could be saying something that was not the truth about what the photo captured. I'm reminded of that photo showing a polar bear swimming in the Arctic Ocean, with little ice floating around him. The caption says global warming is destroying the bear's environment (which may or may not be the truth-not for my point). But the truth about the photo is that polar bears often swim in the ocean, in fact great distances and have been doing that long before man burned fossil fuels. The photo depicts a true scene. The caption was written to make a political point and falsely describes what actually is happening.
No, it doesn't. Polar ice in the north is shrinking year on year. That is a provable fact from imagery taken by satellites. As polar ice forms part of a polar bear's habitat therefore the polar bear's habitat is shrinking (or being destroyed) as a result of global warming. The photo has been chosen to tell a story and does so in a way that grabs attention. Maybe you would have preferred the polar bear to be photographed in water without any ice around it instead? Regardless, the photo is very much in tune with what is actually happening - unless you choose to deny climate change (global warming) as a result of human activity and its impact on the environment - especially in the artic circle.
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If the picture is cropped to show anything but what really happened, then it is a lie....
That is logically impossible. A (non-manipulated) picture always shows what really happened, and thus can never lie. Whatever the picture shows, whatever the crop, it is real. Our perception of that reality, our ability (or lack of it) to "connect the dots," to interpret what we see, to create a narrative around it, is what causes it to be (potentially) a lie. If the picture shows two soldiers standing above someone and the rifle is visible, than that's the reality (unless something was photoshopped in or out). That't the truth. Whether it is "the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is a matter of our perception and interpretation and is (often) for courts to decide.
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Emerson even goes so far as to allow that you might composite in clouds, as long as they're shot at the same time from the same place -- so you get the light and perspective correct.
For Emerson, is "the same time" a fraction of a second or 20 minutes or … however long we wish as-long-as there are no tell-tales that this could not be a single exposure?
To the original topic: what if the photographer had waited, camera secured on tripod, as the weather changed and clouds sometimes blocked and sometimes revealed shafts of sunlight - and then took from several different exposures, different elements to represent what they experienced on that sea shore?
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
Close-up focus stack? Many photographers value bokeh but surely not for "its reality".
Pay whatever price is necessary to say what you need to say. Sometimes you pay a high price (Gurksy) and hope that it's worth it. Sometimes you pay a lower price (Evans).
Evans? Frederick H. Evans (http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=1774) who simply put the lens-cap back-on whenever people wandered into the long-exposure :-)
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It's not the pixels that are left after the crop or zoom that aren't real. They are what was captured by the camera, However, it's the meaning or interpretation the viewer makes from what he sees in those pixels that creates the falsehood. Let's say the crop leaves the soldier aiming his gun at the head of another. The pixels are "real", but the viewer assumes the soldier is about to kill the other. Of course the "truth" is that there are soldiers there helping their fallen comrade, a totally different understanding that better comports to the truth of the situation. Failure to present that in the final picture is a distortion of what really happened. Does it matter if the final image came from a crop or from a zoom lens? It's just not convincing to state that we need a court of law to determine whether we are fooling the viewer or not. Imagine what the soldier who was helping his friend would feel if you presented a photo that made it appear as if he was about to shoot him instead.
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There are very few cases in which journalistic cropping lies, simply because journalistic photos always focus on some central issue. That's why the photographer is there. If you crop out the central issue, nobody wants the photo. (If Andrew is referring to the same "famous photo" that I'm thinking of, t hat was not a simple crop; two photos were cropped and then stitched to make an entirely different scene. The LA Times photographer was fired.)
There are cases, most often seen on TV, where cropping eliminates an issue, but not an obvious one, and those crops do create a lie. Where you see this most often is when there is a public demonstration against something, but only a few demonstrators show up. The TV crew then crops in close, eliminating empty space, with the demonstrators crowded together, so that it's impossible for the casual viewer to tell that the "demonstration" only attracted twelve people in a city of three million. A journalist, however, may look at the marching crowd and if you see the same face three times in 45 seconds, you'll know what is going on.)
I completely reject Tony jay's position here, simply (imo) because it's the kind of naive college-dorm argument which asks, What is "reality?" What is "objectivity?" Photography is quite a pragmatic pursuit, and at its bottom level -- the unattended video camera which simply shoots everything that passes within range, with no post-manipulation or deliberate cropping -- can provide quite objective evidence, good enough for judges and juries to use in sentencing a person to death or long prison terms, as we're seeing in the Boston Marathon trial. In that case, almost all the evidence, and even the pursuit and arrest of the guilty people (and the killing of one of them) was conditioned by photography. I would argue that that is photography at its most fundamental level. There are many manipulations possible after that, done for all kinds of reasons, and some of them subtract from the objectivity of the unattended camera, and some of them may incrementally add to the reality. I think such things as HDR, used with care, may enhance the the reality of a photo; and, compared to the basic unattended camera standard, so might a different selection of ISO, shutter speed, aperture and so on.
The decision between what you'd argue is reality and what you'd say is unwarranted manipulation -- the line, if you want to use that word -- has little to do with the photograph, but more to do with honesty. As I wrote earlier in this discussion, I have no problem with anything done to a photographic file, as long as the manipulation is disclosed if there is a possibility that it might be mistaken for an unmanipulated file. The standard "It sells better" is not, in my opinion, an excuse for lying about the condition of the photo.
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However, it's the meaning or interpretation the viewer makes from what he sees in those pixels that creates the falsehood.
An interpretation is required as to what's relevant and what isn't. With respect to the polar bear image you refer to, this has been done very well - be it via crop or zoom, a story and message were presented that outline the plight of an entire spieces (and for which you appear to have no sympathy!)
At some point someone has to decide what makes it into the crop and what doesn't, be it the photographer or editor because it isn't possible to include everything visible (both above, behind, in the lens field of view and out of) at the time of a photograph is made to present the full context of every situation: this includes all cat photos on the Internet. A person could also mount an argument that the use of bokeh is to be banned because it blurs out detail in the the scene captured by the camera and it is only through a deliberate choice by the photographer that relevant detail in the field of view it is excluded.
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Andrew,
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality. Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality. Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
If the above represents the truth then it should withstand scrutiny. Consider each part in turn.
The power of a photograph over other forms lies in, precisely, its reality.
Which is to say: the greater the reality of a photo, the greater its power.
At this juncture two cases can be made:
1. The less manipulation that is carried out, i.e. the closer to the RAW file, the greater the reality of a photo. The logical conclusion is therefore that manipulation should not be carried out at all in order to maximise the power/reality of a photo;
2. Manipulation has the potential to increase the state of a photo to one more believable as representative of reality than if the photo was not manipulated. The logical conclusion is therefore that manipulation can have a positive effect on the power/reality of a photo.
Every bit of manipulation you perform sacrifices a little bit of that reality
Which is to say: manipulation has an adverse effect on the power/reality of a photo, which contradicts point 2 above. The latter is therefore discarded, leaving point one above as the logical outcome of your original statement.
Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
Which is to say: by making none.
Perhaps you're trying to figure out...
I'm not.
All this is implicit, I even dare say clear, in the original statement: Therefore, make your sacrifices count.
Clearly it wasn't/isn't to me.
I found the picture.
Thank you.
Each version is a different field of view of what existed at the time of capture. Where is the lie? That each photo gives rise to a different interpretation does not mean that "all crops lie". The photographer cannot possibly know how each person will interpret a photo.
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What makes it into a photo is different than what makes it into a painting. While a painter only adds things he wants and deletes things he doesn't want, moving them around as he sees fit, the viewer understands that the painter is interpreting what he sees through his mind.
But the viewer of a photo has traditionally understood photography as capturing reality. While he may accept differing viewpoints of contrast, saturation, etc, the basic meaning of the photo is assumed to be the truth. He assumes the photographer is not deceiving him with what the photo means. This is especially important in photo-journalistic and documentary photography and is no different than the phoney written article about the gang rape that Rolling Stones reported on as truth. It's very dangerous and creates all kinds of social and legal problems.
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The power of a photograph over other forms ....
But really, it's not a statement intended to be picked apart and analyzed for detailed meanings. Like any attempt to compress a great deal of thought in to a small number of words, its meaning depends on the reader to expand it into something that makes sense to them. If it doesn't resonate with you, then it's probably best to just move along.
I am saying that manipulation, like sausages, costs you something. What, exactly, hardly matters. It behooves you to spend a bit of effort getting a good bargain.
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Andrew,
...it's not a statement intended to be picked apart and analyzed for detailed meanings.
Guilty as charged. Peace.
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But the viewer of a photo has traditionally understood photography as capturing reality. While he may accept differing viewpoints of contrast, saturation, etc, the basic meaning of the photo is assumed to be the truth. He assumes the photographer is not deceiving him with what the photo means. This is especially important in photo-journalistic and documentary photography and is no different than the phoney written article about the gang rape that Rolling Stones reported on as truth. It's very dangerous and creates all kinds of social and legal problems.
IMO there's a discussion to be had about whether or not viewers of photos should by default understand photos as capturing reality, but I agree that the general public—despite Photoshop, etc.—largely still does. Thus, yes, photographs purporting to show "real things" should be held to a higher standard of objectivity, accepting that objectivity as an absolute is not attainable by humans or cameras. Moreover, objectivity in the visual world ultimately has no meaning. Mass emits light…everything beyond that is interpretation.
-Dave-
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I completely reject Tony jay's position here, simply (imo) because it's the kind of naive college-dorm argument which asks, What is "reality?" What is "objectivity?"
I won't characterize the argument you put-forward.
If applied to writing, your argument would have us put health warnings on poems and songs because literal description was fundamental.
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John, in response to your post, it is a long time since I was in a college dorm and just as long since anyone accused my of naivety.
The fact that photography (and videography) can be used for forensic purposes does not in and of itself prove any point about photography and reality.
Have you done any forensic-type photography?
I have, and merely pointing the camera at the subject and pressing the shutter does not give the desired result (reality) I can assure you.
The photography that I am referring to is not for a court of law but for medical publication.
It is extraordinarily difficult to take an image that really does communicate the reality of what is being photographed.
During my medical training I remember looking at hundreds (thousands?) of images of medical conditions and procedures that, on reflection, simply failed to communicate the reality of what they were trying to communicate. Frankly, many of those images were just misleading and this became apparent when one viewed the real thing.
Knowing this did not make the task of photographing any easier although it did quickly inform me of when I had not succeeded.
I had a friend who was, at one time, a forensic photographer for the Queensland Police. He did relate on occasions how tough his job was and the sort of lengths one needed to go to so as not to mislead the investigators or the prosecutors. Even in court it was difficult, on occasion to convince legal teams that no one image could possibly, on its own, communicate the reality the crime scene or accident scene, and that a single image might easily contradict what was obviously the case when all the imagery was viewed together.
With regard to more general genres of photography my original point stands. It is very easy for an out-of-the-camera image to distort reality.
I don't know about you but I employ various techniques that will result in "unreality" as a virtue.
When shooting birds with a wide open aperture I absolutely love the completely blurred backgrounds while my subject is crisply in focus. The reality that I am after is a beautiful bird portrait, but, not for a second, do I regard my image as an absolute capture of reality.
Very slow or very fast shutter speeds in dynamic scenes will also introduce an "unreality" impossible to view with the naked eye.
And so back to the point that I was originally trying to make: There is no need need to invoke post-processing as an evil that can introduce unreality into images when it is so easy to achieve this in-camera.
Tony Jay
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Explain to me how it is different to crop a picture vs use a different zoom setting and why one would result in a person being fired and the other not.
No, it doesn't. Polar ice in the north is shrinking year on year. That is a provable fact from imagery taken by satellites. As polar ice forms part of a polar bear's habitat therefore the polar bear's habitat is shrinking (or being destroyed) as a result of global warming. The photo has been chosen to tell a story and does so in a way that grabs attention. Maybe you would have preferred the polar bear to be photographed in water without any ice around it instead? Regardless, the photo is very much in tune with what is actually happening - unless you choose to deny climate change (global warming) as a result of human activity and its impact on the environment - especially in the artic circle.
Polar ice is indeed shrinking in the north, but polar bears have been swimming for long distances even before that.
In fact, just a week ago, crew aboard the offshore supply vessel Atlantic Merlin spotted a polar bear in the water not far from Hibernia oil platform located in the Atlantic Ocean some 315 kilometres east-southeast of St. John’s. By then he was exhausted and tried to get up on the platform.
However, the longest distance swim by a mammal belongs to a female polar bear that swam for a record-breaking nine days straight, traversing 426 miles (687 kilometers) of water.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/07/110720-polar-bears-global-warming-sea-ice-science-environment/
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Surely, the long distance swimming record belongs to some species of whale. :D
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OK, I stand corrected, I meant land mammals.
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Have you done any forensic-type photography?
I have, and merely pointing the camera at the subject and pressing the shutter does not give the desired result (reality) I can assure you.
The photography that I am referring to is not for a court of law but for medical publication.
It is extraordinarily difficult to take an image that really does communicate the reality of what is being photographed.
During my medical training I remember looking at hundreds (thousands?) of images of medical conditions and procedures that, on reflection, simply failed to communicate the reality of what they were trying to communicate. Frankly, many of those images were just misleading and this became apparent when one viewed the real thing.
Knowing this did not make the task of photographing any easier although it did quickly inform me of when I had not succeeded.
Tony, I was for several years the documentary photographer on a high-intensity archaeological dig in Israel. (In fact, the dig neatly bridged the film-digital divide.) The photography was critical because structures and layers were, of course, destroyed as the dig went deeper -- the only remnant of the findings were photos, drawings and scientific samples. The idea of the photography was for a later (maybe many years later) non-participant to be able to look at the photos and drawings and samples and essentially reconstruct the dig. And once the structure or layer was gone, it was gone. No re-takes. There were a number of issues here -- archaeologists complaining that what we shot was not what they wanted -- but the issue was with the photographer, not with the photos. The photos showed what they showed; if what they showed was not what was wanted, it wasn't the fault of the camera and film. Sometimes the fault was with the photographer, but sometimes, it was with the archaeologists, not explaining clearly enough what they wanted. But never with the camera or the photos themselves.
I have also taken photos in operating rooms (I once wrote a book on plastic surgery.) Again, the problem wasn't that what the photos showed wasn't reality, the problem was that the structures were often so vague that really the best capture would have been with a drawing. When you're talking about fleshy structures damp with blood, all of about the same color and illuminated with extremely bright and flat OR lighting, sometimes it's even hard to see with your eyes what's going on, which is the reason that surgeons poke around so much, and use so many gauze pads to soak up moisture in a wound. They often have to feel what they're doing, as much as see it. A camera may simply be the wrong instrument with which to record the scene.
As for the unreality of wide-open shots, with OOF backgrounds, take a look at your finger tip sometime, and without changing focus, let your mind register what the background looks like. That's exactly what you're doing with flying birds, and the phenomenon of sharp focus in one area, and OOF backgrounds, is familiar to anyone who ever thought about it.
The fact that photography (and videography) can be used for forensic purposes does not in and of itself prove any point about photography and reality.
I don't think there's any way to "prove" much of anything in this debate. But I would argue that photography's greatest strength in most fields, including landscape, lies in fidelity to a recorded scene. There are other ways to work with photos, of course, but generally (not always) the resulting product is weaker than an unmanipulated shot. IMHO.
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Interesting take on the subject. While I do agree in most part, I do think Mr. Briot does not go far enough because he could not call himself a photographer anymore.
Example 1: A snapshot on any camera (film or digital) without any kind of manipulation (filters, photoshop etc.) is a photograph. It depicts the reality as was happening in front of the camera at that moment. Is it a photograph ? Definitely. Is it art ? Maybe (depends on the viewer).
Example 2: A photograph manipulated to the result seen in the image of the original essay. Is it a photograph ? No. Is it art ? Yes (or again maybe).
Example 3: An oil painting of a valley with photographs sticked in to it of various objects in the painting (tree, rock, you get the idea). Is it a photograph ? No. Is it art ? Yes (or again maybe).
All 3 examples have an IMAGE as a result. All 3 examples have a PHOTOGRAPH as their component. Only one of them has a PHOTOGRAPH also as a result.
Call me purist in the negative way if you like, but once an artistic (or even technical) process changes so that the product can be wildly different than what is expected as a result from the process, then the product and process are renamed to not invade the territory of the established original. That's why creating photo-realistic imagery in a computer with help of a 3D modeling program is not called photography (even tho the result is indistinguishable from a photograph). That's why the category of art includes so many processes and results. However it seems to me that many people proud themselves being called a photographer when the results they produce are something else. They fear to be called something else.
Mr. Briot is correct in one crucial thing. Disclosure is important. The fun part is, it is important only in competition with other artists to ensure a level playing field. Admiring the final product as an "end user", I don't care how it was produced.
(I hope the above is readable. I do construct sentences that are above my knowledge of the English language when carried away by the subject)
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Yes, it's very clear that the concern was -- "…this photograph gained an unfair advantage (http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/New_Landscape_Award_Winner_021112.pdf) [pdf] in this category and in winning the overall competition."
indeed- quote from the pdf...
"
Whilst digital manipulation is a valid part of an artistic process for many photographers and is encouraged in the ‘Your view’ category, the extent of the changes made was in breach of the ‘Classic view’ category."
As it seems a lot of the discussion here is not relevant to the original post.
the problem was just about violating a set of competition rules. As it should be.
this is the winner of the 'your view competition 2012''
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But I would argue that photography's greatest strength in most fields, including landscape, lies in fidelity to a recorded scene. There are other ways to work with photos, of course, but generally (not always) the resulting product is weaker than an unmanipulated shot. IMHO.
"weaker" ?
The specific example Alain Briot referred to was the winning entry in the 2012 Landscape Photographer of The Year competition.
(Also: "David’s image of Delamere Forest, which won the Classic view category, and his image ‘The Copse’ which was Highly commended in the Living the view category have also been disqualified for the same reason.")
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Example 1: A snapshot on any camera (film or digital) without any kind of manipulation (filters, photoshop etc.) is a photograph. It depicts the reality as was happening in front of the camera at that moment. Is it a photograph ? Definitely. Is it art ? Maybe (depends on the viewer).
But there's no such thing as a photograph without any kind of manipulation. With film the development & printing processes have been tuned to yield images that we consider faithful to how our eye/brain system interprets light. With electronic systems the data from color filter array'd photosites is interpolated into continous tones and gamma curves are applied to a linear tonal range to again yield "faithful" images. None of this has to be so. It's a choice we've made. I recommend having a look at some pre-demosaic'd, linear-toned digital files for a better idea of what sensors (via CFAs) and analog-to-digital converters see.
IMO much of the fuss here would go away if we owned up to the fact that what we consider to be visually objective is in fact utterly interpretive. "Okay, our visual systems process electromagnetic input in a certain way. We call this 'seeing.' We generally want our photographic tools & techniques to mimic the way we see. We will consider the photos that result from more faithful mimicing to be 'accurate' and/or 'realistic' while acknowledging that such terms are rooted in subjective experience. Photos that are less faithful in this mimicing will be considered 'experimental' or 'tonally abstract' or whathaveyou." Then you insist that documentary, journalistic & forensic photography measure up to your standards of accuracy and realism. So you get standards without resorting to non-existent BS like objectivity or purity.
-Dave-
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A great deal of what we "see" is in fact made up by our brain from context anyways. Photographs, being often quite small, defy this to a degree, but still.
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...confusion, frustration and the feeling of having been wronged both on the part of the photographer...
The photographer has no right to feel wronged - it is encumbent upon entrants to read the competition regulations.
Isaac,
"David’s image of Delamere Forest, which won the Classic view category, and his image ‘The Copse’ which was Highly commended in the Living the view category have also been disqualified for the same reason."
When David failed to read the competition regulations the likelihood that he would contravene them increased with the number of competition categories he entered.
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I keep telling myself not to go here. The subject has been beaten to death, but I can't resist... ;D
Image manipulation, whether it be Photo Shop or classic dark room photo comping techniques, is one of those hot button subjects in photography and has been ever since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century. It can be boiled down to what people perceive to be drawings or paintings made with an artist's subjective interpretation of the natural world versus photographs that they perceive to be "straight-forward" literal renderings of the natural world. However, from the very beginning of the photographic craft, photographs were always prone to being manipulated in order to produce "photo illustrations" (i.e. using photographic methods, materials, and processes to yield a highly stylized and interpreted version of the world). When you try to differentiate "staight" photography versus "photo illustration" it quickly bogs down, but IMHO, it seems to turn on the simple feature of multiple exposures (i.e., composited visual elements derived from more than one singularly exposed image) versus a single uninterrupted photo exposure of a naturally occurring scene in real life.
What complicates the matter further is those relationships of color and tonality in the final print. We must all realize that neither "straight" photographs nor "photo illustrated" images ever really bear a truly accurate color and tonal resemblance to what someone can actually see. Even when a color scientist tries to pin down the exact color and tonal relationships using modern colorimetry, the scene still gets interpreted through arbitrary standards like 0/45 degree measuring instrument geometry and scene brightness equations that only hold under simplified observer/illuminant conditions. None of us (not even people with color blindness), for example, see the world in pure Black and white, yet B&W images are often considered the quintessential version of "straight" photography.
I try to give my students informative examples of "straight" photography versus "illustrative" photography to help them walk safely through this mine field. Consider Ansel Adam's "Moonrise Over Hernandez". It would have been trivial, even in Ansel Adams day and long before Photo Shop, for Adams to have created his seminal work with all the elements present in the original scene except the moon in the sky, and then later composite another shot of the moon into the scene with conventional darkroom techniques. The end result would look exactly like we see this famous print today. But somehow, in my mind, it would not have been nearly as impressive. We are inspired by this photograph precisely because all the image elements were there at a specific moment in time, a feat that photography does astonishingly well, and you could go back to that very place on thousands of other occasions and never be able to replicate that single exposure.
Compare and contrast Adam's "Moonrise" to Phillipe Halsman's "Dali Atomicus" (google it if you don't know this image). Start by looking at Halsman's "straight" photograph, highly choreographed but still a "straight" photograph on the day of the photo shoot, and then compare it to the final composited version that was published in Life Magazine. His final masterpiece is a fully composited and highly retouched image, but it's pure genius. So, in the hands of an artist, both a "straight" photograph (Adam's Moonrise) and a photo illustration (Halsman's Dali Atomicus) can be amazing works of art. Seems to me that both "straight" photography and highly manipulated "photo illustrations" can easily coexist and be treated as fine art when made by gifted photographers with care, devotion, and discretion.
Care, devotion, and discretion seem to matter greatly in all aspects of human endeavor :)
best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
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The photographer has no right to feel wronged - it is encumbent upon entrants to read the competition regulations.
Perhaps that is not how the photographer would have characterized his own feelings about the competition. Much of the commentary seems to be behind a paywall (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qHQ0-4_9DsoJ:https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2012/11/the-landscape-photographer-of-the-year/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us), this is all I have seen --
"I have to inform you after a conversation with Charlie Waite I have been disqualified from the Landscape Photographer of the year awards, unfortunately I didn’t read the regulations (http://petapixel.com/2012/11/02/landscape-photographer-of-the-year-2012-stripped-of-title-for-too-much-shoppin/) and certain editing like adding clouds and cloning out small details are not allowed, while I don’t think what I have done to the photo is wrong in any way, I do understand it’s against the regulations so accept the decision whole heartily.
I have never passed off my photographs as record shots and the only reason this has come about has been due to my openness about how and what I do to my images. The changes I made were not major and if you go to the locations you will see everything is there as presented."
When David failed to read the competition regulations the likelihood that he would contravene them increased with the number of competition categories he entered.
By John Camp's reasoning David Byrne's photos should be "weaker" and yet that does not seem to be how they were judged in competition.
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Isaac,
Perhaps that is not how the photographer would have characterized his own feelings about the competition.
Yes, he appears to have acted graciously upon learning of the unfortunate incident.
Much of the commentary seems to be behind a paywall...
I'm sorry I can't help as I do not subscribe to On Landscape.
By John Camp's reasoning David's photos should be "weaker" and yet that does not seem to be how they were judged in competition.
Were any "unmanipulated" photos (by anyone) entered into the competition?
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But there's no such thing as a photograph without any kind of manipulation. With film the development & printing processes have been tuned to yield images that we consider faithful to how our eye/brain system interprets light. With electronic systems the data from color filter array'd photosites is interpolated into continous tones and gamma curves are applied to a linear tonal range to again yield "faithful" images. None of this has to be so. It's a choice we've made. I recommend having a look at some pre-demosaic'd, linear-toned digital files for a better idea of what sensors (via CFAs) and analog-to-digital converters see.
IMO much of the fuss here would go away if we owned up to the fact that what we consider to be visually objective is in fact utterly interpretive. "Okay, our visual systems process electromagnetic input in a certain way. We call this 'seeing.' We generally want our photographic tools & techniques to mimic the way we see. We will consider the photos that result from more faithful mimicing to be 'accurate' and/or 'realistic' while acknowledging that such terms are rooted in subjective experience. Photos that are less faithful in this mimicing will be considered 'experimental' or 'tonally abstract' or whathaveyou." Then you insist that documentary, journalistic & forensic photography measure up to your standards of accuracy and realism. So you get standards without resorting to non-existent BS like objectivity or purity.
-Dave-
I really don't know how to respond to this in a normal way. Basically after deleting 3 or 4 different attempts I realized that it's futile with you given the argument you used. You are confusing flaws in the technological process with intentional manipulation (or doing mixing them on purpose).
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I really don't know how to respond to this in a normal way. Basically after deleting 3 or 4 different attempts I realized that it's futile with you given the argument you used. You are confusing flaws in the technological process with intentional manipulation (or doing mixing them on purpose).
Perhaps one of the better arguments is to look at an in-camera JPEG.
Basically, many people regard this as "unmanipulated" whereas, in fact, it is manipulated in many of the same ways that one would do a RAW conversion in Lr, ACR, C1, etc.
The only difference is, in the case of the in-camera JPEG, some engineers from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, etc have made the decision about how the JPEG's from their cameras will look rather than any individual doing a raw conversion.
Tony Jay
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With regard to those who brought up cropping as lying, what about perspective? i.e. the position one is shooting from along with cropping - in this case as it's a moving image, cropping in time in this famous Guardian newspaper advert from the 70s [or 80s?] which illustrates this. Fashion note - the skinhead style was worn at that time in the UK by those who liked to behave in a thuggish manner.
The Guardian commercial - Points Of View (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3h-T3KQNxU)
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Call me purist in the negative way if you like, but once an artistic (or even technical) process changes so that the product can be wildly different than what is expected as a result from the process, then the product and process are renamed to not invade the territory of the established original.
Words change their meaning over time or become archaic. Each generation makes meanings useful to their lives and will pay no heed to the demand that things should stay the same.
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after reading the different opinions about this topic, I think that there is a problem with the use or definition of words....photo, picture, image, manipulation, reality, see, envisage, etc.....for me a photo is just and image of what was in front of my lens during the instant I pressed the shutter....a picture could be a photo or a composition of several photos.....what is reality?....for me reality is what was there in front of my eyes...and I can express that in different ways....in black and white if I like textures, lines, light and shadows, colour if I like to see the colours of the nature.....manipulation is to put red where there was not red, or green where there was no green at all, clouds where there were no clouds, absence of a person where it was a person, etc. ....luminance and saturation of the different colours, at least for me, are dependent on the observer, so that they can be adjusted during the development process...in fact, in the days or film, the characteristics of the colours in a photo depended on the film (Fuji, Kodak and Agfa gave different tonalities, so..where was the "real" colour of the landscape?)....this also means that a photo can be taken as IR or even UV....my eyes cannot see them, but they are there!...so that...an IR or UV photography...is not real?.....HDR....is not real?.....yes, it is because I am not modifying the subject, I am taking several photos (almost instantly) to improve the exposure and the view of the subject, but I am not manipulating the subject.....I am helping the sensor to see what my eyes can see at once.......the UV and IR contributions of light in the landscape are there, I am not creating light......the same analysis could be done with respecto to filters and composition of photos to obtain a panorama.....
Now....what is a picture?...it can be a photo....or the sum of manipulated photos....in the past I used to follow a well-known bird photographer until the appearance of digital photography. I discovered that some very nice or amazing photos were not photos but "pictures". When the eye of the bird was out of focus, he used to take the eye of the same bird from another photo and replaced it, when the wing was out of the frame, he used to copy and paste the lacking part of the wing...so for me that was not a photo, it was a "picture".....for me the real value of a photo is "to be there" and have the expertise to obtain a view of a certain subject at a certain instant.....I am not saying that what Alain Briot or some other photographers do is not fine art....I like very much the images that I see in Briot's web site and his art of composing them....he is a real artist, but for me (most people can disagree), they are not photos.....if the clouds were not there at the moment he took the photo, I am not seeing how the subject was, but what Alain would have wanted to see there after thinking and experimenting with the images...that's perfectly OK and I accept that....so he is not ruining landscape photography, he is creating (great) landscape pictures.....this is my personal view of what I consider a photo and what not, but this is just an opinion......
Agustin
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Perhaps one of the better arguments is to look at an in-camera JPEG.
Basically, many people regard this as "unmanipulated" whereas, in fact, it is manipulated in many of the same ways that one would do a RAW conversion in Lr, ACR, C1, etc.
The only difference is, in the case of the in-camera JPEG, some engineers from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, etc have made the decision about how the JPEG's from their cameras will look rather than any individual doing a raw conversion.
Tony Jay
Nobody argues that photos ARE reality, just that they are an excellent two-dimensional version of what you see. What the engineers have done is tune a sensor to provide what (in their minds) is the best version of that visual reality; and their versions (say, between Fuji and Sony) may be somewhat different. Still, they fall within a range that most people find acceptable. We can know that because large numbers of people spend large amounts of money buying those cameras in large numbers for purposes of replicating or preserving what they saw. I am not a purist when it comes to this: I think some adjustments may be necessary to make a photograph more closely resemble a visual reality. You often need those adjustments in such things as skiing photos, where you have both large amounts of sun-lit snow with a background of dark spruce and pine trees. The range is simply outside of what most (or any) cameras can handle, and some judicious HDR work may give you something closer to what the brain sees.
But that's not what we're talking about when we discussion "manipulation." Manipulation (as the word is commonly used) means moving away from what the eye saw. Taking out phone lines is manipulation, as is grafting in new elements. Again, I really don't have a problem with these processes, as long as they are not used to lie.
By John Camp's reasoning David Byrne's photos should be "weaker" and yet that does not seem to be how they were judged in competition.
Really? I thought he lost.
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I always tell myself not to open a can of worms . . . unless they are really good worms. What becomes of shutter speed? If someone takes a very long time exposure photo with a 10-stop ND filter and the resulting picture has creamy water and clouds, is that now not a photograph? That reality was not visible to an unbiased observer. It cannot now be reality. So must it now be something else even though the photographer only took one exposure and did not post process anything into the scene that was not there? The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), "light"[2] and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing",[3] together meaning "drawing with light". Greek is a very concrete language. When you use the Greek, it means what it means. It was a language in use by a people who valued thought or building a case for supporting their thought. The logos to telos. The logical argument resulting in a conclusion. The Greek is way wider a definition than any that are argued here.
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Nobody argues that photos ARE reality, just that they are an excellent two-dimensional version of what you see. What the engineers have done is tune a sensor to provide what (in their minds) is the best version of that visual reality; and their versions (say, between Fuji and Sony) may be somewhat different. Still, they fall within a range that most people find acceptable. We can know that because large numbers of people spend large amounts of money buying those cameras in large numbers for purposes of replicating or preserving what they saw. I am not a purist when it comes to this: I think some adjustments may be necessary to make a photograph more closely resemble a visual reality. You often need those adjustments in such things as skiing photos, where you have both large amounts of sun-lit snow with a background of dark spruce and pine trees. The range is simply outside of what most (or any) cameras can handle, and some judicious HDR work may give you something closer to what the brain sees.
But that's not what we're talking about when we discussion "manipulation." Manipulation (as the word is commonly used) means moving away from what the eye saw. Taking out phone lines is manipulation, as is grafting in new elements. Again, I really don't have a problem with these processes, as long as they are not used to lie.
Really? I thought he lost.
Thanks for the clarification John.
It does seem, based on the above, that, in fact, our views on this matter are really pretty closely aligned rather than divergent.
Tony Jay
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By John Camp's reasoning David Byrne's photos should be "weaker" and yet that does not seem to be how they were judged in competition.
Really? I thought he lost.
I suppose you're being facetious, but fwiw --
"…further investigation has confirmed that the image chosen as the overall winner (http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/New_Landscape_Award_Winner_021112.pdf) is in breach of the rules for the Classic view category owing to the extent of the digital manipulation techniques used.
…
The image was judged in good faith and was the clear favourite amongst the judges."
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Really? I thought he lost.
I suppose you're being facetious, but fwiw --
I have never suggested that various manipulation techniques couldn't be used to make a photo much more dramatic, foreboding, happy, etc. Of course they can; that's what this whole argument is about.
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So we have divided manipulation up, hmm:
Intentional versus not-intentional
Inherent in the action of the camera(?) versus not
at least.. I maintain that it's all manipulation starting from selecting the point of view and framing, and that parsing it out finer is a fool's game. But that's just my opinion.
Then we have:
Photos are inherently real (unless manipulated?), and the viewer's interpretation of the scene is a separate issue
versus
Yes, exactly, that's the bloody point. What the viewer sees in the photo is either more or less exactly congruent to the actuality of what was there, depending on, well, things.
And I maintain that the photo without a viewer interpreting it is a nonsense idea. Who cares about photos in drawers? And all manipulation, see above, alters the way the viewer perceives the depicted, however subtly or not.
I think there's a great deal of parsing out of detail, and filing the details in little boxes, to no purpose whatsoever. Ultimately it's all manipulation, and ultimately it all changes the way the viewer sees what's in the picture.
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I have never suggested that various manipulation techniques couldn't be used to make a photo much more dramatic, foreboding, happy, etc. Of course they can; that's what this whole argument is about.
Manipulation (as the word is commonly used) means moving away from what the eye saw. Taking out phone lines is manipulation, as is grafting in new elements. Again, I really don't have a problem with these processes, as long as they are not used to lie.
Manipulation (as the word is commonly used (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/american-english/manipulation)) means "the act of influencing or controlling someone or something to your advantage, often without anyone knowing it" or "the act of controlling or moving something by using the hands".
What the discussion seems to have become about is de-legitimizing some people's artistic choices, while privileging other people's artistic choices.
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A quote (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2015/04/hilarious.html) for today (Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer):
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Who's Lying?.png
Anyone who suggests photographs were not manipulated before digital.
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I think that when you use long exposures, it is obvious to the viewer that it isn't real. There isn't any dishonesty. I wonder how people who paste in skies and such talk to people about their photographs? Do they talk about the different times they took different parts of the photo? Or do they just pretend it is real?
I hope it's OK for me to ask -- Do you use long exposures? Do you talk to people about how the long exposure created an appearance of ocean surface that has never existed?
We can all make assumptions about what is or is not obvious to the viewer, to serve whatever argument we're putting forward; but we know that what's obvious to the viewer will depend on their knowledge of photography.
I've seen people's disappointment on learning that the contrast and exposure (and so the colour) of a sky had been adjusted -- even though that produced a far better match to the sensibly perceptible reality of the scene. Given a naïve expectation, people will be disappointed.
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As for the unreality of wide-open shots, with OOF backgrounds, take a look at your finger tip sometime, and without changing focus…
As I expect you know, we continually change focus with our eyes and do not normally experience OoF (excepting presbyopia and other failures) anymore than we normally experience the retinal blind spot.
But I would argue that photography's greatest strength in most fields, including landscape, lies in fidelity to a recorded scene. There are other ways to work with photos, of course, but generally (not always) the resulting product is weaker than an unmanipulated shot.
That seems to be an assertion not an argument, you don't try to show why we should regard "fidelity to a recorded scene" as photography's greatest strength.
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I've been away most of the day with work and I've lost track of who's arguing which side. I may confuse this thread with the other one about bullying. Oh wait. This is the Photoshop/Manipulation topic. I'll just post a photograph then. It is a single image, no pasted in sky. Tell me if this is reality.
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As I expect you know, we continually change focus with our eyes and do not normally experience OoF (excepting presbyopia and other failures) anymore than we normally experience the retinal blind spot.
Isaac I cannot agree with you here. Yes, if one looks at a scene our eyes usually do rove around and so we perceive that everything is in focus. If eyes are in good condition they can switch focus from very near objects to distant ones in an instant.
But I have always enjoyed shooting with a shallow DOF, even with landscapes sometimes, and I tried to work out why I had that preference when it came to my photography. John's example is a perfectly good one. When you look at your fingertip the eyes concentrate on that one subject. An object just an inch to either side (even at the same distance) is just a blur. With a camera lens everything on the same plane would be in focus - but the eye is more like using a Lensbaby in that it throws everything else out.
I like the ability to just look at one thing and not be distracted by anything else at all. Of course I could let my eye rove around - but I enjoy using shallow depth of field to really draw the viewer in to precisely what I want them to look at. A man standing in a field shot full-length with say an aperture of 1.4 would have a very out of focus background. In the real world we might look around and record the detail in the rest of the scene - but I might want to make the viewer see exactly what they would if they just concentrated on that man. In fact right now I can look down my 100ft garden and focus on one flower. The flowers just either side are less distinct even at that range.
Now I guess some optician is going to tell me I have a major eye defect!!
Jim
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...Now I guess some optician is going to tell me I have a major eye defect!!
No, not at all.
Your observations (pardon the pun) about how one sees or does not see are not at all far off the mark.
At any instant in time most of our field of vision is not sharp.
Light striking the fovea generates the most detailed image but other parts of the retina generate less detail but are more sensitive to movement.
However as we take in a scene with our eyes roving around (often a subconscious process) we are able to construct a view of the scene where much (or all) of it is sharp and detailed to the point where a detailed recollection of that scene may be possible.
This apparent "post-processing" actually starts in the retina (which is really a modified extension of brain cortex), continues in parts of the midbrain and is completed in the visual cortex which is formed by most of the occipital cortex of the brain.
Tony Jay
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Isaac I cannot agree with you here. Yes, if one looks at a scene our eyes usually do rove around and so we perceive that everything is in focus. If eyes are in good condition they can switch focus from very near objects to distant ones in an instant.
Jim, it seems that you do agree with me that we do not normally experience OoF.
John's example of staring fixedly at his finger tip might (like examples constructed to show the retinal blind spot) suggest something about the mechanics of how vision works; but people don't spend their day staring fixedly, John's example simply does not describe our normal experience.
John's example … With a camera lens everything on the same plane would be in focus - but the eye is more like using a Lensbaby in that it throws everything else out.
I think the experience is more interesting: when I stare fixedly at my finger tip, I don't experience the background as uniformly blurry - I experience the background as simplified, detail is lost but I don't experience what remains as blurry. That's in contrast to what I experience as I move my finger tip towards my face, when all too soon the finger blurs.
(Incidentally, because I don't have any special knowledge about human vision, I'm entertained by the nuggets I stumble over: "…our nervous system has evolved to optimally detect changes in our environment. As a consequence, unchanging aspects of the visual field fade from view. To counteract this, our retinae have to move with respect to the visual surrounding. This strongly suggests that eye movements are essential to sustain visual perception (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698909003691) during fixation.")
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David,
It was a joke.
Having said that, our (relatively) in-focus field of view approximates to a horizontal ellipse, when our eyes are stationary.
We see with our eyes only that which falls within our field of view. Does everything outside of it not exist as a part of reality?
Actually, there are physicists who contend that nothing is "real" until it is observed. Others take it less far, but the wave/particle duality experiments show that reality does extend to the observation. And then there's Heisenberg's limits on what can be observed. What we think of as reality isn't nearly as simple as our everyday use of the term.
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What we think of as reality isn't nearly as simple as our everyday use of the term.
Our everyday use of the term likely means sensibly perceptible reality.
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I have never suggested that various manipulation techniques couldn't be used to make a photo much more dramatic, foreboding, happy, etc. Of course they can; that's what this whole argument is about.
You did qualify it as your opinion but really what came before that seemed like more of a definitive statement which people are likely to react against, in this case highlighting that your opinion wasn't shared by this contest.
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But I would argue that photography's greatest strength in most fields, including landscape, lies in fidelity to a recorded scene.
I'll make a prosaic counter-claim: photography's greatest strength is Quick&EasyTM image-making. (Compare to tracing (https://books.google.com/books?id=7NrmQgAACAAJ) mirror or lens images.)
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Has photoshopping effected a reduction in the proportion of the general public that considers a landscape photo to represent reality? Has it effected an increase in the proportion?
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Has photoshopping effected a reduction in the proportion of the general public that considers a landscape photo to represent reality? Has it effected an increase in the proportion?
It’s like with everything these days. Reality of everything is more virtual (you decide whether more or less real).
Otherwise the weak point of you sentence is general public and photoshopping. I can only guess what you are imagining under the each term and how much they can be distant from what they are.
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Actually, there are physicists who contend that nothing is "real" until it is observed. Others take it less far, but the wave/particle duality experiments show that reality does extend to the observation. And then there's Heisenberg's limits on what can be observed. What we think of as reality isn't nearly as simple as our everyday use of the term.
Just to note: in physics observing means using some sort of probing or interacting technique, such as firing photons or electrons at the object you wish to observe and then using a detector to record how the object reacts (typically by emitting photons and/or electrons in turn). At very small scales the objects to be observed are naturally in a state of superposition, with non-definite values for properties such as spin, position & trajectory. By making the observation you interfere with the object's superposition state and thus cause its properties to take on definite values. This is known as decoherence. None of this requires a conscious observer…the entire process can be, and usually is, automated. Also, I don't know off-hand of any current quantum physicists who contend that objects in superposition aren't real. (There are, of course, physicists who reject the deeper implications of quantum mechanics while accepting its descriptive & predictive accuracy. Einstein was one such.) They're just real in a different sense to, say, the cup of coffee sitting in front of me right now. :)
-Dave-
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To start with, I will note the vast majority of large aperture shallow DOF images show far stronger OOF effects than we would see when viewing the same subject "live". There are exceptions like the extreme example above of viewing or photographing our finger tips at "macro" range, but most shallow DOF shots are not like that (See more on that case below). Indeed, the classic example used to denigrate "formats smaller than the one that the speaker prefers" is portraits, so I ask: how often do you look at a person and see the eyes in sharp focus both the ears blurred? (Let alone seeing one eye in focus, the other not.)
But there is another simple physical factor rarely mentioned: our eyes have smaller apertures than most lenses. The lenses in our eyes have a focal length of about 17mm to 22mm, and in decent light the iris opening is about 5mm or less, giving about f/4, going down to about 2mm and so f/10 in bright light. [The opening is up to about 8mm in dim light, so you will see that maximum figure quoted for the human eye, but that extreme does not occur in typical viewing conditions, like daylight or reasonably well-lit indoor locations. Moreover, when our irises are that wide open, our vision is significantly degraded by lack of light and lens aberrations.]
If we consider the part of the image on the retina considered as our "normal" field of view excluding peripheral vision, so a region about as wide as the focal length, our eyes are effectively in a format with roughly 20mm frame width, so about 4/3" to APS-C format. Thus we have DOF comparable to a 20mm "normal lens" in such a format. Converting to the old currency of equivalent DOF in 36x24mm, we get something in the range from 30mm and f/6 to 40mm and f/8. If instead you use the extreme 8mm figure, our eyes' lenses are roughly 20mm f/2.5, and the DOF corresponds to something like a 30mm f/4 or 40mm f/5 in good old 35mm format.
Conclusion: the lenses in our eyes give OOF no stronger than typical kit zoom lenses in formats 4/3" and up ... and that is before eye movement and the sophisticated "image manipulation" done by our brains create a perception with diminished OOF effects. This still applies in extreme cases like viewing or photographing our finger tips at macro range: most kit zooms will still give as much or more OOF effect there as we see "live".
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HSway,
...the weak point of you sentence is general public and photoshopping. I can only guess what you are imagining under the each term and how much they can be distant from what they are.
I knew at the time I wrote my post that my question could not be answered definitively but was curious as to the thoughts of others.
Ever since this (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=97433.20) thread (refer to my posts and the response they subsequently attracted) I have wondered if the proportion of the general public (referred to - poorly - by me in the thread as "non-photographers") that considers a landscape photo to represent reality has increased, decreased or remained constant over time. As a result of the responses I received I assumed the answer to be: decreased.
Others in this thread have touched on the issue, and it occured to me that the terms photoshopping and photoshopped normally are used pejoratively by the general public (as well as some photographers).
I wondered if it was indicative of an undercurrent of cynicism in a general public that did, in fact, consider photography to represent reality, but which had lost confidence that reality was portrayed in post-digital landscape photography. If true, I wondered if Photoshop (other software is available) could be indirectly considered responsible for "ruining landscape photography".
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Has photoshopping effected a reduction in the proportion of the general public that considers a landscape photo to represent reality?
I knew at the time I wrote my post that my question could not be answered definitively but was curious as to the thoughts of others.
For sake of argument, let's assume the answer is: Yes!
Would it be A Bad ThingTM for everyone to understand that they should not just accept "a photograph" at face value?
If true, I wondered if Photoshop (other software is available) could be indirectly considered responsible for "ruining landscape photography".
For sake of argument, let's assume the answer is: Yes!
So landscape photograph as-was is ruined; and it's business as usual, while we're moving to landscape photography as-will-be.
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HSway,
I knew at the time I wrote my post that my question could not be answered definitively but was curious as to the thoughts of others.
Ever since this (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=97433.20) thread (refer to my posts and the response they subsequently attracted) I have wondered if the proportion of the general public (referred to - poorly - by me in the thread as "non-photographers") that considers a landscape photo to represent reality has increased, decreased or remained constant over time. As a result of the responses I received I assumed the answer to be: decreased.
Others in this thread have touched on the issue, and it occured to me that the terms photoshopping and photoshopped normally are used pejoratively by the general public (as well as some photographers).
I wondered if it was indicative of an undercurrent of cynicism in a general public that did, in fact, consider photography to represent reality, but which had lost confidence that reality was portrayed in post-digital landscape photography. If true, I wondered if Photoshop (other software is available) could be indirectly considered responsible for "ruining landscape photography".
I see what you mean. I think what’s important here is to realise that photographer today has better control over the process of making a photograph. That results in couple of changes, quite dramatic ones:
We have better photographs.
They can be manipulated to a greater degree and easier (creative use, photograph-based art).
The control can be misused in various ways (making untrue claims, competitions).
I don't think the general public is agonising over this that much. Things are quite simple most of the time. Because of the greater control we need to get used to the fact that the person behind the particular photography is what determines its character. And get used to greater degree of interactions among the photographers in this sense (as is happening). It can be that the "general public" may be faster at grasping this than the photographers themselves. That is not that unusual, actually, whenever there is more and direct involvement things tend to look more complex.
We are getting used to this new photography, its potential and consequently to the adjusted mechanisms the photography is judged, classified and perceived.
Oh, and people also change. I don’t now mean whether it is early morning or evening type of a change but rather whether it was 1920 or 2015. Quite a lot and faster and faster. It's the nature of the beast, I think.
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IsaacTM,
For sake of argument, let's assume the answer is: Yes!
Would it be A Bad ThingTM for everyone to understand that they should not just accept "a photograph" at face value?
Perhaps the tendency of the general public to accept a photo at face value is directly related to how Quick&EasyTM it is to take one. If correct, the two would be inseparable.
I don't consider that it would be A Bad ThingTM in principle for everyone to understand that they should not just accept "a photograph" at face value. I just cannot imagine it transpiring in practice.
For sake of argument, let's assume the answer is: Yes!
So landscape photograph as-was is ruined; and it's business as usual, while we're moving to landscape photography as-will-be.
...founded upon cynicism and lost confidence on the part of the general public. Is that a price worth paying, even if the general public's tendency to consider a landscape photo as representative of reality is misplaced?
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Perhaps the tendency of the general public to accept a photo at face value is directly related to how Quick&EasyTM it is to take one. If correct, the two would be inseparable.
We take short-cuts, either: accept at face value, or reject because nothing can be trusted. Between blind-faith and cynicism, a healthy skepticism reserves judgement until we have sufficient information to judge responsibly -- but that takes work.
What if you'd grown-up knowing that it's Quick&EasyTM to alter a just-taken photo with a few taps on a phone screen.
I don't consider that it would be A Bad ThingTM in principle for everyone to understand that they should not just accept "a photograph" at face value. I just cannot imagine it transpiring in practice.
It isn't just photographs. I seem to remember being chided by my grandmother - Just because something's written down doesn't make it true (and variations on that theme).
...founded upon cynicism and lost confidence on the part of the general public. Is that a price worth paying, even if the general public's tendency to consider a landscape photo as representative of reality is misplaced?
A case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. (Incidentally, why would we think that "the general public" spends time considering landscape photography at-all?)
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Isaac,
What if you'd grown-up knowing that it's Quick&EasyTM to alter a just-taken photo with a few taps on a phone screen.
Are you asking me a question?
...why would we think that "the general public" spends time considering landscape photography at-all?
In the above context, I doubt it does.
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More like a rhetorical counter-claim than a genuine question.
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As the author of the article which forms the subject of Mr Briot's post , I thought I might clarify an issue that lies at the heart of the difference between Mr Briot and myself.
In the Artist's statement on his web site Mr Briot writes,
"my goal is not to create an image that represents something that exists, as is, in reality, in the "real" landscape. Rather, my goal is to create an image that is believable, an image of something that one can consider to be possible, even though one could not quite find this exact same image in nature."
It is not, therefore, surprising that Mr Briot took exception when I wrote in my article that,
"An artist creates images from their imagination and that is a wonderful thing. Just leave photography to record what the camera sees not what the photographer wishes it had seen."
Mr Briot calls my statement 'comical' and 'preposterous'. It is regrettable that he descends to such discourtesy because, in effect, we both love photography but have different concepts of what constitutes a 'photograph'
That we come at this topic from different stand points does not make my arguments 'dangerous' as he states. They are merely based on a differing concept of Photography.
I sincerely believe that Landscape should speak for itself. Mr Briot obviously scorns the idea that anyone would want to 'document' what lies in front of the lens and leave it at that.
My concern is that the tools offered by photoshop allow the creation of what Mr Briot calls 'something that one can consider to be possible' I admire and respect the amazing creativity of those who digitally alter images to produce artworks.
My argument is simply that these are not 'photographs'
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I sincerely believe that Landscape should speak for itself. Mr Briot obviously scorns the idea that anyone would want to 'document' what lies in front of the lens and leave it at that.
Don't know Mr. Briot and can't speak for him but from reading the article I don't believe that "Mr Briot obviously scorns the idea that anyone would want to 'document' what lies in front of the lens and leave it at that." What Mr. Briot seems to scorn is the idea that anyone would define photography as strictly documentation and not additionally allow for photography as interpretive art.
You seem to have a very narrow view of what constitutes photography while Mr. Briot seems to have a broader viewpoint on the definition. Personally, I tend to share Mr. Briot's viewpoint although that's not to say it's right and your viewpoint is wrong...merely differences in opinion.
All the best...
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My argument is simply that these are not 'photographs'.
Words change their meaning over time or become archaic. Each generation makes meanings useful to their lives and will pay no heed to the demand that things should stay the same.
[1857-59] "Le Gray innovated by successively printing parts of two negatives onto the same proof: a landscape and the sky of his choice, photographed elsewhere. He applied this technique to his marines in particular, taking advantage of the flat horizon line that eased the joining of two negatives, thereby emphasizing the horizon's presence and strengthening the force of the resultant image. The effect is stunning... The critics sang his praises, and his photographs of the sea were often exhibited and sought after." page 50
Reproducing Reality: Landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s in relation to the paintings of Gustave Courbet, Dominique de Font-Réaulx. (http://books.google.com/books?id=w7SkRSN_PLEC&lpg=PP60&ots=Md7FQJ5VoN&dq=%22a%20landscape%20and%20the%20sky%20of%20his%20choice%2C%20photographed%20elsewhere%22&pg=PP60#v=onepage&q=%22a%20landscape%20and%20the%20sky%20of%20his%20choice,%20photographed%20elsewhere%22&f=false)
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My argument is simply that these are not 'photographs'
[ You suffer from a remarkably limited and, most likely, poorly thought out point of view. ]
ETA: The previous is an ungenerous and arrogant way to say this. Yours is an opinion, which differs from mine. I believe that your argument is more a matter of opinion and feeling than strictly of logic, but such is much of life.
Manipulation begins the moment you put a frame around part of the world. It ends whenever you knock off and call the picture "done". You're drawing an arbitrary line and saying "before this, it's a photograph, after, it is something else."
Now, drawing these lines in various places has long been a popular sport, but it has equally always been futile. I've read many arguments about where to put the line, starting from around 1860, up to the present day. The one common thread is that all the arguments (yours, Emerson's, the NYT's, etc) are silly, devolving under inspection into "well, I think that it ought to go there" wrapped up in a bunch of words that completely fail to support the position.
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You suffer from a remarkably limited and, most likely, poorly thought out point of view.
Manipulation begins the moment you put a frame...
That is utterly patronizing, Andrew, if not downright insulting. A friendlier way of putting it is that people have different views on the subject. Otherwise I could continue in the same tone and say that your "manipulation" stance is utterly ridiculous.
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Honestly, Slobodan, this is one of those things that I think is objectively true.
I've wrestled with this for years, and I see no way to draw a line between "this is manipulation" and "this is not". Every possibility falls apart upon inspection.
Yes, I am aware that most photographers have a more or less clear notion of where the line ought to be. Even me.
This view, like so many views that people in general hold, appears to be an irrational one made up mostly from opinions held by our teachers and peers.
The fact that most people hold some view or another does not mean that the view is well thought out, or rational, or not limited.
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... The fact that most people hold some view or another does not mean that the view is well thought out, or rational, or not limited.
Correct, doesn't mean that on a general level. However, throwing such a statement to someone's face directly just makes you arrogant, as if you are the keeper of the truth, judge of what is well thought out, etc.
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I admit to being arrogant ;) I will go and edit the original post.
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I hesitated before posting to this forum having read some of the discourteous contributions. Having a different
Point of view makes for interesting discussion but using 'ad hominum' arguments which insult the writer rather than address the arguments makes for depressing reading.
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Very well, I will address the arguments. Let me quote what I think is the core of your argument:
The problem comes in defining when enhancement crosses a boundary into alteration. Removing power lines from a landscape is one thing. Changing the colour of the sky from grey to orange quite another.
Enhancement is alteration. Your distinction between removing power lines and changing colors appears to be completely arbitrary. But let us read on, since you do address the issue of color. Perhaps all will be made clear:
It isn’t as if there is any shortage of sunsets around to photograph and the joy of landscape photography is capturing the elusive, not manufacturing it with software.
This is pure opinion. This is where you find joy, others may find their joy elsewhere. And in any case, what has one's joy to do with what is and is not photography, or "alteration" versus "enhancement"? I completely fail to see the connection.
It’s no crime to create a sunset sky, it’s just rather sad that someone would need to do it when there is so much natural colour to photograph. How many times have you looked at a super saturated landscape photograph and known instinctively that it’s false? Yet we see these photographs constantly win awards in club and national competitions. Anyone who has studied the way sunlight paints the landscape from different angles knows how to capture the best colour without needing Photoshop.
With respect, this entire section appears to be nothing but a backhanded insult to people who adjust colors with Photoshop. You describe it as "sad", you complain that these pictures win competitions, and then for a big finish you imply that people who need to do it are simply not sufficiently skilled as photographers.
Essentially, you seem to be saying that since it is possible to photograph pleasing colors, one ought to do that, and one ought NOT adjust colors in post. Am I to presume, that since removing power lines is OK, that it is NOT possible to shoot landscapes without intrusive power lines? The power lines, and indeed the entire concept of "enhancement" (which is permissible) is simply left hanging, so I am really not sure what to make of it. The only point that is really clear is that adjusting colors is not OK.
Ironically, your jumping off point is a black and white photograph.
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... Enhancement is alteration....
That is pure opinion at best and circular reasoning at worst. You simply claim that something that remains to be proven actually already "is." That is like saying "erotica is pornography."
For what is worth, I fully share Nelsonretreat's position.
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What?
How on earth is one to 'enhance' a picture without changing it? Is the enhancement somehow entirely inside the artist or something?
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... How on earth is one to 'enhance' a picture without changing it?...
The law of transformation of quantity into quality, Hegel's dialectics, my friend.
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Enhancement, considered naively as a mere English word or as a result of some dialectical argument or process, is pretty inescapably a subset of alteration.
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Enhancement... is a subset of alteration.
Of course, but the degree matters. Otherwise you could argue that we are all criminals, as we have at least once in our lives broken some laws, even if by speeding or jaywalking.
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Precisely. And now it becomes a question of how much is too much. And questions of whether this is more or less than that. And the whole thing disintegrates into, basically 'I think this is OK and that is not'
Which is perfectly fine but not a basis for declaring that what you do is true photography and what the other chap does is mere painting in "the crude lipstick of Photoshop."
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Having a different Point of view makes for interesting discussion…
Indeed.
Here's something you wrote in the original article - "… The problem comes in defining when enhancement crosses a boundary into alteration. Removing power lines from a landscape is one thing. Changing the colour of the sky from grey to orange quite another. …"
Am I correct to read that as your endorsement of removing power lines from a landscape image?
Later you write - "Just leave photography to record what the camera sees not what the photographer wishes it had seen."
Please explain how "removing power lines from a landscape" could be considered to be leaving "photography to record what the camera sees"; or make another attempt to help us understand that you're drawing a boundary based on principle rather than caprice - Whatever I decide to do is OK, whatever I decide not to do is not OK.
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In my opinion, the way the camera records the scene and the way most human see or perceive the same scene might differ. In this case you need to manipulate the image recorded by the camera to make it look "real"
I like this quote from forum member RSL in the thread http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=97433.msg796929#msg796929 (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=97433.msg796929#msg796929)
One problem landscape photography has is that it can't even begin to compete with competent landscape painting. Among other examples, I'm thinking about Bierstadt's "Among the Sierra Nevada." He used severe linear perspective distortion to make a contrast between high and forbidding mountains in the background and a gentle, idyllic scene centered on a lake in the foreground. The height of the mountains is very much exaggerated, but they give the viewer the feel of the mountains in certain atmospheric conditions. You simply can't distort linear perspective this way with a camera. If you use a long lens to raise the height of the mountains, the lake in the foreground becomes a creek and you lose the whole point of the scene.
Two examples:
1) Moon illusion: cameras are immune to this issue and there is no way that a image straight out of the camera will look the same as we might have perceived the scene
2) Low light conditions (luminance below 10^-3.5 cd/m^2). Given proper exposure, cameras will record the scene exactly the same way as if the luminance was much higher. On the other hand, those light conditions will be in the range of scotopic vision, were we would be unable to differentiate color (e.g. something that would be bright red under different lighting conditions appears now as dark gray).
What will be the accepted approach here? Leave the image with the full colors or try to emulate perception under scotopic vision?
In relation to:
"Just leave photography to record what the camera sees not what the photographer wishes it had seen."
I can agree for forensic or documentary work, but if this was a rule or law, I would quit photography immediately
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Precisely. And now it becomes a question of how much is too much. And questions of whether this is more or less than that....
True, but we deal with it everyday in our lives. Is it lust or love? Is it a romance novel, erotica or pornography? Hard to define, yes, but we still use those terms and most reasonable people (hairsplitters notwithstanding) would agree which is which when they see it.
The parallel would be, imho: photography, fine art photography, photo illustration. That is, no or minor enhancement, reasonable enhancement, alteration. The distinctions are to be intuitively grasped, not parsed by hairsplitters. If one insists on hairsplitting, it is actually quite possible, say in a court of law, where the intention (to deceive or not), context, degree, importance of changes, etc. would be established. But we are not there yet (in the court of law), so intuitively grasping is fine. Well, with me, at least. It is equally fine that we disagree on which is which. As long as we stay friends :)
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Well said. Far be it from me to be a hair splitter! (Well, sometimes I slip up, but I hope I don't mind too much when a friend calls me on it!)
I think this is a case where there is very little agreement. To be sure almost all will agree that putting a frame around a piece of the world and snapping is OK, be it 'manipulation' or no. And I think most will agree that if you obliterate every form and tone and color, drawing in your own for all, that is too far and no longer deserves the name 'photography' whether you call it enhancement or painting.
Between the two extremes, though, virtually every position has its proponents. There truly does not seen to be some general social consensus to which we may cleave.
This is probably so, if it is, because nothing of importance is on the line. We must have definitions for violent crime, for society's sake. And so a general social consensus arises upon which we may base our law.
So, yes, one can in theory proceed on the basis of social convention, on the general idea that most people know it, roughly, when they see it.
In this particular case, though, I don't think that works.
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That is logically impossible. A (non-manipulated) picture always shows what really happened, and thus can never lie. Whatever the picture shows, whatever the crop, it is real. Our perception of that reality, our ability (or lack of it) to "connect the dots," to interpret what we see, to create a narrative around it, is what causes it to be (potentially) a lie. If the picture shows two soldiers standing above someone and the rifle is visible, than that's the reality (unless something was photoshopped in or out). That't the truth. Whether it is "the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is a matter of our perception and interpretation and is (often) for courts to decide.
I have to say that there are some wrong statements here. Its not being a hairsplitter stating when the basic assumptions plainly are wrong:
First ,there is no such thing as a "A (non-manipulated) picture". By offering different camera designs one offers different manipulations. This is just one example that disproves the statement of "A (non-manipulated) picture".
Secondly one picture can never, never ever show what happens even inside the frame of this picture. Why? Because a camera with one lens collapses the 3-D reality into a 2-D picture. Consider yourself making a photo with a big rock where you glimpse someone behind with one of your eyes. The camera cannot see this through its one lens. So it doesnt see "what relly happened". As an observer at the scene you can percieve what happens, but seeing the phto cannot allow you to percieve the same.
Third "Whatever the picture shows, whatever the crop, it is real". Yes, in that sense everthing is real. But its not the same reality as the original scene of the photography. Its a probe, a representation of the reality. So if I manipulate a photo in order to make it a better representation of the "reality" I perceive, who are you to jugde that as not being the reality?
With due respect,
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That is pure opinion at best and circular reasoning at worst. You simply claim that something that remains to be proven actually already "is." That is like saying "erotica is pornography."
Except Erotica is simply pornography with better lighting, composition. :P
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I have to say that there are some wrong statements here. Its not being a hairsplitter stating when the basic assumptions plainly are wrong:
First ,there is no such thing as a "A (non-manipulated) picture". By offering different camera designs one offers different manipulations. This is just one example that disproves the statement of "A (non-manipulated) picture".
Secondly one picture can never, never ever show what happens even inside the frame of this picture. Why? Because a camera with one lens collapses the 3-D reality into a 2-D picture. Consider yourself making a photo with a big rock where you glimpse someone behind with one of your eyes. The camera cannot see this through its one lens. So it doesnt see "what relly happened". As an observer at the scene you can percieve what happens, but seeing the phto cannot allow you to percieve the same.
Third "Whatever the picture shows, whatever the crop, it is real". Yes, in that sense everthing is real. But its not the same reality as the original scene of the photography. Its a probe, a representation of the reality. So if I manipulate a photo in order to make it a better representation of the "reality" I perceive, who are you to jugde that as not being the reality?
With due respect,
Well put.
Possibly one of the biggest fibs ever was the phrase 'the camera never lies'
All photography is an interpretation of reality.
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That is utterly patronizing, Andrew, if not downright insulting.
The words pot, kettle and black spring to mind......