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Author Topic: The Art of Fooling Around  (Read 24973 times)

nutcracker

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The Art of Fooling Around
« on: October 11, 2013, 11:12:39 am »

Reichmann has been Raberised (Raberized in North America?).

It was fun reading Michael's article, and clearly fun writing it.
Even more improvement has been achieved on the LuLa site.
Wonderful attitude.

Sean
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fike

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2013, 01:12:08 pm »

Thank you Michael for being the grownup in the room.  At one time I too was defensive about the photoshop question, until I embraced it and started enthusiastically saying, "Of Course!"  and then following up with something like  "I used photoshop to make the scene look like it felt to me in that moment." 

In addition to worries about people thinking your pictures are untrue, I think people are a bit offended by the implication that doing things in Photoshop is easy and therefore of little value.  Some things may be easy in Photoshop...just as easy as putting a brush to canvas, but making things look great aren't easy, even in Photoshop.
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Colorado David

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #2 on: October 11, 2013, 01:31:02 pm »

Does anyone remember when Velvia was scoffed at by some photographers because the colors were too saturated?  People said it wasn't real.  Some photographic disciplines refused to use it or take any photograph shot with it seriously because it did not render colors they way they thought they should be.  As photographers, we have a tool box, fortunately today it's a pretty good, big tool box, and we can choose the tool we want to use to satisfy our vision.  Not everyone has the same vision.  I will occasionally use HDR (oh the horror, oh the humanity) to achieve my vision.  To me, I use it as if I had a giant softbox fill flash, not to create something surreal.  But if you like surreal, knock yourself out.  I was riding the bus on the far side of the Savage River in Denali a few years ago.  There was a group of photographers in the seats in front of me, one of whom you would knew of if I mentioned his name.  They were talking about how bad HDR was, but they all used focus stacking. It sounded to me as if they really liked box-end wrenches, but really hated sockets.  Different tools.  To me HDR is to exposure what focus stacking is to depth of field.  Use what you like, produce what you want to produce, but don't make the I'm right so you must be wrong argument.

That's not aimed at anyone, by the way.  Just my comments.  I could be wrong.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2013, 01:33:53 pm by Colorado David »
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john beardsworth

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #3 on: October 11, 2013, 02:02:47 pm »

Hooray, everything is a photograph and deserves equal respect? How dare anyone discriminate? Anything goes!

Right....

John
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Isaac

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #4 on: October 11, 2013, 02:28:36 pm »

Quote
Like other visual artists let's have the courage to create images that express how we imagine a scene was, rather than just what the camera saw.

"The photographer can insist till he's blue in the face that a given image is art, but the rest of us expect at least a measure of reportage there -- and we are half the equation."

"Photography in the Age of Falsification"
, The Atlantic, May 1998


Quote
The "Did you Photoshop that?" crowd are no longer asking that question, because they are doing it too.

So do they now automatically assume a picture is more Photoshop than Photograph?

So do they now automatically assume I can't believe what you're showing me was not a creation from your mind?


Of course this isn't completely new. One of Galen Rowell's anecdotes (page 29 in "Galen Rowell's vision: the art of adventure photography") tells of his concern about disbelief of his 1981 photo Rainbow over the Potala Palace, Lhasa.


After Dolomites, Italy is disbelief the appropriate response to Big, Big Iceberg or do photographers magically get to have our cake and eat it too?
« Last Edit: October 11, 2013, 02:32:02 pm by Isaac »
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fike

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #5 on: October 11, 2013, 02:33:29 pm »

...


So do they now automatically assume a picture is more Photoshop than Photograph?

So do they now automatically assume I can't believe what you're showing me was not a creation from your mind?

...

I think neither is necessarily true. With the ubiquity of processing tools, I think what we have now is a more sophisticated audience and now they get it.  They understand what it means to make an image sepia or add a vignette or increase contrast, etc....  When people are skeptical of what they see and what they read, they are better consumers of media...photography is not excluded. 
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Isaac

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #6 on: October 11, 2013, 02:46:58 pm »

When people are skeptical of what they see and what they read, they are better consumers of media...

When in genuinely doubtful situations, people respond with doubt - that's healthy skepticism; but as a general attitude skepticism becomes a way to dismiss what we dislike.
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AFairley

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #7 on: October 11, 2013, 04:56:31 pm »

One of Galen Rowell's anecdotes (page 29 in "Galen Rowell's vision: the art of adventure photography") tells of his concern about disbelief of his 1981 photo Rainbow over the Potala Palace, Lhasa.

When I was in Rowell's gallery they had out sheets of "outtake" chromes, so people could see for themselves that the colors in the prints had not been jacked up in the printing.
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laughingbear

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #8 on: October 11, 2013, 05:55:01 pm »

Quote
Like other visual artists let's have the courage to create images that express how we imagine a scene was, rather than just what the camera saw.


Period.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vn12n9xrwejxt0o/ovs_opf_XI-16.jpg

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Floyd Davidson

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #9 on: October 11, 2013, 05:57:35 pm »

This issue of having fun and letting go is an artist's domain. Some photographers that need images to be "real" use reality as their  standard because it can be measured.. Therefore this is good, or rather not "wrong".   Academic excellence is measurable. "It's Real" is the mantra.  Being real does not guarantee art. This goes for painters too. Taking chances is scary and not a measurable quality. It take guts to let go.

Guts?  It takes education and an understanding of what photography and art actually are.  Reality is not excluded from art, nor is it included.  There is no relationship at all!

Somebody asked Picasso "What is art?", he responded "What isn't?" 

But then lets make no mistake about photography either, it is never reality.  NEVER!  As Garry Winogrand put it, "Photography is not about the thing photographed.  It is about how that thing looks photographed." The scene is reality, the photograph is an illusion created by the photographer using tools such as a lens, a camera, and of course an image editor too.

Reichmann's article said,  "[...] let's have the courage to create images that express how we imagine a scene was, rather than just what the camera saw."  He's almost right.  It isn't courage we need, but the creativity and techniques required to make an image that communicates the feelings we have chosen to viewers.  Just note that what the scene was has little to do with it, and all that counts is what the photograph is.  They are connected only through the filter of a photographer's imagination.
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Isaac

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #10 on: October 11, 2013, 08:24:18 pm »

"The creativity and techniques required to make an image" -- Digital Art Masters Volumes 1 through 8

;-)
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John Camp

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #11 on: October 12, 2013, 02:15:27 am »

I pretty much disagree with all of it, and with good reason.
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wolfnowl

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #12 on: October 12, 2013, 02:24:42 am »

I did a talk back in July for our local photo group on the essentials of digital photography, and one part of that was that you take a digital sensor - which is basically a collection of little, tiny solar panels - you collect electrical charges that have been filtered through a Bayer matrix, you run them through an Analog to Digital Controller and you end up with a string of ones and zeroes.  That forms the basis for a digital image, but is it a photograph?  Digital images aren't 'things', they're just binary code stored as electrical impulses on a storage medium.  THEN we run that information through a raw converter (either on the computer or in the camera) and we come up with a bunch of coloured dots displayed on a screen.  Did you Photoshop that isn't even a question anymore.

Mike.
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Floyd Davidson

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #13 on: October 12, 2013, 02:34:54 am »

"The creativity and techniques required to make an image" -- Digital Art Masters Volumes 1 through 8

;-)

I'm not sure of your point there, but it appears to be that the list for "creativity and techniques required" is huge, which is true, but...  no individual photographer or photograph uses but a fraction of them.  All that any given photographer needs is a few techniques and but a smidgon of creativity to make any one really nice photograph.

Of course it absolutely is true that producing many great photographs, day in and day out week after week, requires an enormous set of talents!
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Floyd Davidson

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #14 on: October 12, 2013, 02:37:21 am »

I did a talk back in July for our local photo group on the essentials of digital photography, and one part of that was that you take a digital sensor - which is basically a collection of little, tiny solar panels - you collect electrical charges that have been filtered through a Bayer matrix, you run them through an Analog to Digital Controller and you end up with a string of ones and zeroes.  That forms the basis for a digital image, but is it a photograph?  Digital images aren't 'things', they're just binary code stored as electrical impulses on a storage medium.  THEN we run that information through a raw converter (either on the computer or in the camera) and we come up with a bunch of coloured dots displayed on a screen.  Did you Photoshop that isn't even a question anymore.

Mike.

That is all true.  Note that film was absolutely no different, except it cost more and was harder to do at the basic level.
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Harald L

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #15 on: October 12, 2013, 03:56:45 am »

I pretty much disagree with all of it, and with good reason.

And you won't tell us the reason, right?

H
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JFR

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #16 on: October 12, 2013, 05:39:41 am »

I think I would agree with most of it except for the conclusion. The problem isn't that photographers take their art too seriously, it is that they don't.

If the older art forms have taught us anything is that to really create something original you have to stand your ground. Caravaggio and later Rembrandt, Delacroix, Manet and then the impressionists and expressionists all were breaking the rules and had to pay for it in their early careers by being outcasts 'art circles'.

Fine art photography becomes a decorative art if you treat it as a craft. You need experimentation to find the way you want to express yourself. The problem with most modern art forms is that it stops there and then your work has little permanence. They just threw away the rulebook and are now without any direction.

The most famous painters were game changers, the same goes in photography. They didn't just experiment and left it at that. They saw things crystallize through experimentation and changed the rules for themselves and stuck by them. But almost all were very methodical in doing so.  Sure they were mocked, but if you stand behind what you are doing that is no problem and you can explain it when asked. The 'outside world' wouldn't think image manipulation to be a problem if photographers hadn't created those problems.
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graeme

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #17 on: October 12, 2013, 10:35:11 am »

I pretty much disagree with all of it, and with good reason.

I'd be interested if you could elaborate on that statement John.

Graeme
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #18 on: October 12, 2013, 10:53:55 am »

... But then lets make no mistake about photography either, it is never reality.  NEVER!  ...

Oh, no! Yet another RedwoodGuy just made it to my personal LuLa's Hall of Fame (a.k.a. Ignore List) ;)

michael

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Re: The Art of Fooling Around
« Reply #19 on: October 12, 2013, 11:17:26 am »

Wow. Does everything have to become a dick size comparing contest or an argument?  ???

Michael
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