Not "touching" photos

Some friends of mine own a beautiful house with lots of glass and natural timbers that they built themselves ... the house is a delight of shadows and shape and I've always loved it. They have a friend who is a professional photographer and quite well known, who stayed with them for a weekend and shot a series of pics on a tripod with a D2 Nikon and wide lens and created an HDR masterpiece of the interior of their beautiful loungeroom for them. I was commenting one night while around there for dinner that I thought their house was one of the nicest I had ever been in. They rushed off and got the framed pic that their friend had presented to them and proudly showed it to me because they know I am keen on photography and wanted me to be impressed ... which I was not!

I thought the pic looked nothing like the house that I love ... to me it had light in places where light shouldn't have been and the whole shot had a surreal biscuit tin lid look to me. Apparently this photographer makes a lot of money with these types of pics and people pay good prices for them to hang on their walls.

This is a bit of a drift from Avotius's point because I'm only encompassing one type of manipulation ... HDR!

I hate it and don't understand why there is this need to drag details from shadows that don't get seen by the human eye in normal circumstances by overlaying mutliple exposures to create a photgraph that no camera is capable of taking!
 
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I agree with the point made here by a number of people, that HDR is currently a fad and will go away as an end in itself. Then, it will become one of ever increasing number of tools that everybody has available in their toolbox (whether it's called PhotoShop or something else).

What I personally don't agree with, is the first assumption that limiting yourself is bad. I found my pictures improved when I moved away from my 2 special lens setup (28mm for architecture, 90mm for just about anything else including macro) to a single lens 50mm setup. I also thought my pictures improved when I moved away from my auto exposure (diaphragm priority) SLR to a full manual exposure RF. The reason is that these limitations forced me to be more aware of what I was doing. Maybe it's also got something to do with a change in my style. I didn't know what I wanted to achieve with my photography when I was playing around with the 28/90 setup, but when I went for the 50mm only, it's because I understood that I wanted to make portraits of people that are important to me. Instead of being lost in the jungle of tools, I knew where I wanted to go. I've known others just like me, but who didn't find their calling and who became fondlers. Great people to have around on forums: I learned a lot from them ! But for me, what is in the picture is more important.

That's why prefer to keep it simple and only study new tools when I really need them. Yes, I crop in a photo editor, and sometimes I correct the perspective. I will study conversion to B&W and I know a little bit about modifying contrast & brightness. I will try to use these tools (and maybe others) to create a look: I want to have a signature style that people can I can identify with and that others can recognise. And I want to achieve that in the simplest way possible, with as little tools as possible, because I'm too lazy to learn how to use them. So you won't hear me brag about "no photoshopping", but in practice, I'll be in the camp of the people who try to use the whole negative and who do only very limited postprocessing. Not because postprocessing is bad, but because I don't care about it because I find it gets between me and my goal, which is my pictures.


Peter.
 
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