Not "touching" photos

[Avotius]

I have a little bone to pick here, so be forewarned!


I have just about had it with these people who take digital photos or scan film then claim "photo not touched up, no adjustments made, no photoshop" and so on. Are you kidding me????? This idea of the purity of photography is absolutely hogwash. Come on now people, we are not police photographing a crime scene (more on this later though) we are trying to pursue what is generally considered an "artistic medium". Art is all about adjustments, changes, creativity, and so on. Being stuck into a art school the last many years if there is one very important thing I have learned its you just cant expect good results from being rigid and not exploring potentials.

Which brings me to this, so many of you on here are much more well versed in the technical side of photography, but few of you (not to toot my own horn here) have the spark that brings all the things together with ideas and creativity. Its not that it is impossible to ever be that way, any "real" artist will tell you that it is possible to learn to see from someone who already can see, but if you bring something else to it, then you are doing something unique. It is a good idea to explore all avenues possible rather then close them off. Also just because you have this so called spark, doesn't mean you will take good photos. I have a friend, he has a great gift for seeing, his photos suck! Why? Maybe its not his medium, maybe its difficult for him to express a creative instinct with the technicality of a camera. Hard to say really. Another person I know, cant see worth anything, he just doesn't have the eye for it, but yet still produces lot of photos, but they all are so....soulless. He cant get past his own barriers to see beyond what he is doing. These things happen! I don't have to tell the people here that its just part of growth.

Which brings me to this: Why limit yourself when you are working with a photo? Scan, darkroom, whatever, anything you do with a photo is already altering the scene, situation, or whatever. By changing aperture you have altered your photo, shutter speed will alter your photo, moving your camera a single centimeter will change your photo. Your choice of film, place of development, choice chemicals, scanner model, local water supply, temperature outside, relative humidity....I think you get the point, there are a million factors to taking photographs. When you scan your negative then proclaim that you did nothing to the scan as a way of trumping the purity of your photography......please!

Anyone who would like to say otherwise, please go take a look at the greatest photographers that ever picked up a camera. Adams was a master of the darkroom. One of HCB's most famous photos is a heavy crop. James Natchway in his War Photographer documentary is shown working with a darkroom expert on altering the look of a photograph to get maximum result. I once saw a presentation about wedding photography, the photographers were so creative and unhindered, the images were truly amazing and of the highest quality, but all were altered in a way that made them very special.

If you feel that taking a digital photo or film shot and sticking it up with "no adjustments" is pure, my goodness, go read (any basic primer will pretty much do) what a digital camera or scanner has to do in order to even see a picture!

And to touch on a point above, even a crime scene photographer can change the context of a image if he is not careful with lighting, perspective, whatever.

In closing, photography is not a means of duplicating the real world. It is a means of interpreting the world through our own vision. Dont let creativity be hindered by foolish notions about "purity".

As my friend and teacher often tells me "issues, ideas, girls".

 

[oscroft]

Adams was a master of the darkroom.

I don't think she's done much since she married David Beckham though.

 

[javimm]

I agree with you here. I really don't limit myself with the postprocessing of my images. I scan the negs and use photoshop to bring what I want from the neg, even if it doesn't resemble the original scene. If I like it, it's valid for me.

An example is a quite a neutral landscape I shot in B&W a couple of months ago. The negative is quite dull, but then I spent about an hour to make it look the way I wanted: Grainy over-the top stormy clouds, black menacing trees, a lake with a boat of black silhouttes. The people at my office loved the photo (they aren't even amateur photogs, just regular people).

My father on the other hand goes for "integrity" as you describe. He tries not to touch his pics too much, and IMHO, he's limiting himself. When he sees my pics, if I show him the original "untouched" and the final interpretation he says "Hey, it's clearly retouched". I don't care, I don't limit myself there. I showed him some photos of Yosemite by Ansel Adams and he said that they're overprocessed 😱. He wants his pics to look just how they looked in place. That's impossible, and undesirable.

Nice read.

 

[usagisakana]

I think the anti-photoshop argument comes from backlash against the incredibly common HDR images you see looking around the net. I personally find them painful to look at... but I bite my tongue, because obviously that really appeals to some people. I don't see a problem with editing my images if I think it will improve them, but I think people see photoshop as encouraging people to not think about how they shoot before they press the shutter, that you can "fix everything" in post processing. But again, whatever works for people and makes them happy...
I personally try to get my image as close to how I imagine it, in camera, before editing it. However sometimes from the outset I have the idea of doing a certain form of editing to elicit a certain effect. I shoot both digital and film. Eventually I hope to have a darkroom where I can experiment with traditional processes.

 

[varjag]

Per HCB, "a hunter isn't necessarily a cook", nothing wrong if you're not interested in pixel fiddling 🙂

 

[tripod]

Personally I'm more into photography than computer assisted illustration. But I'm old. As long as I can do what I want, I don't much care about what others do or how they do it. Life is short. Do what makes you happy.

 

[Avotius]

I don't think she's done much since she married David Beckham though.

Wooooosh! Right over my head. Isnt David Beckham that guy that was just accused for being the single greatest contributer to global warming ever? Actually I dont know who he is, besides that I think he is a football player, and his ugly mug is all over crap here.

 

[oftheherd]

Funny, I am sort of PS challenged. When I post and mention I haven't done much of if any PP, it is usually meant apologetically. I am not showing the full potential of the photo. Whether film or digital, it is difficult to get what you want without PP. That includes film and digital. It is good to get the exposure and composition as close as possible. But that is just to prevent excessive work afterwards.

I guess those who say they haven't altered the photo mean well. I just don't believe them. But as long as they believe themselves, I guess that is what is important to them. I'm not going to go crazy over it either way.

 

[Avotius]

Funny, I am sort of PS challenged. When I post and mention I haven't done much of if any PP, it is usually meant apologetically. I am not showing the full potential of the photo. Whether film or digital, it is difficult to get what you want without PP. That includes film and digital. It is good to get the exposure and composition as close as possible. But that is just to prevent excessive work afterwards.

I guess those who say they haven't altered the photo mean well. I just don't believe them. But as long as they believe themselves, I guess that is what is important to them. I'm not going to go crazy over it either way.

Yeah, but there are many people out there that think that if you do anything to alter a photo in anyway you are in essence "lying". Not everyone is good at PS, fine, thats just the way it is. Im not all that great in the darkroom yet, but working on it. Also I am trying to learn how to use flash's, thats pretty complicated in itself.

Of course I am not saying that everyone should pull the best out of their photo and learn photoshop to the max and so on, absolutely not, that would be absurd. The point is....not to dilute ones self into thinking that there is a "pure" form of photography. My gf gets this problem all the time, her friends dont understand why she edits colors or shoots black and white or so on, to them (most of them are artists but not in our medium) its similar to committing perjury.

 

[Avotius]

Per HCB, "a hunter isn't necessarily a cook", nothing wrong if you're not interested in pixel fiddling 🙂

;p that would be like being mad at Van Gogh for not painting 500x300 inch canvases to utilize "full potential resolution" 😉

🙄

 

[oscroft]

Wooooosh! Right over my head. Isnt David Beckham that guy that was just accused for being the single greatest contributer to global warming ever? Actually I dont know who he is, besides that I think he is a football player, and his ugly mug is all over crap here.

British footballer, now plays in the US, married to Victoria Adams, member of The Spice Girls 😉

 

[oscroft]

To be serious 😉 ...

I think there are a couple of situations where it can make sense to say "No digital changes made". One is if you're showing photos that compare lenses, and you want to be sure that the differences in apparent sharpness, contrast, tone are due to the lenses. And secondly, if you want to explain how you achieved your result (though what you actually did do, rather than didn't do, would be more useful info).

But that aside, art is in the eye of the artist/beholder, and whatever makes images that best please you is all that matters.

 

[mcgrattan]

usagisakana nails it above, I think.

Personally, I don't generally do much in photoshop, but that's just because there's a certain look that I like. However, that's just about making a certain aesthetic choice rather than really about a search for 'purity'. There's a lot of crude post-processing goes on which can be aesthetically displeasing (to me), and it's the reaction against that sort of approach (a lot of HDR is like that, as usagisakana says) that leads to the photoshop backlash.

Personally, I convert colour to black and white quite often and I almost always do some sort of minor level adjustment. But I don't tend to do much cropping or retouching. That's just what works for me in terms of what I like. The process is no less artificial for it.

Ironically, some of my favourite photographs (historically) were quite heavily manipulated. Thinking of Man Ray or Rodchenko, for example. But that's not really what works for me, personally, when I am taking pictures.

 

[oftheherd]

Yeah, but there are many people out there that think that if you do anything to alter a photo in anyway you are in essence "lying". Not everyone is good at PS, fine, thats just the way it is. Im not all that great in the darkroom yet, but working on it. Also I am trying to learn how to use flash's, thats pretty complicated in itself.

Of course I am not saying that everyone should pull the best out of their photo and learn photoshop to the max and so on, absolutely not, that would be absurd. The point is....not to dilute ones self into thinking that there is a "pure" form of photography. My gf gets this problem all the time, her friends dont understand why she edits colors or shoots black and white or so on, to them (most of them are artists but not in our medium) its similar to committing perjury.

I guess I've been lucky in that I have never run into anyone like that. I think it is pretty easy to show them how no one can come anywhere close to shooting "pure" unless with slides, and even then you are subject to the people who do the processing. Is it by machine, at home, dip and dunk, whatever? Has your camera been CLA'd lately? So many variables. 😀

 

[jan normandale]

One of the most illuminating things I've ever seen in my life was a three week time lapse motion picture of Pablo Picasso shown at the Picasso Museum in Paris.

It showed Picasso painting a massive canvas for a mural. He worked on scaffold due to it's size. He painted the entire mural. Then he decided to change a part of the canvas. He primed a corner of about 2 square metres and painted over it to change about a sixth of the entire canvas. He then decided to change another piece of this canvas. Which he did. Several more minor changes followed making at least four changes to this massive 10 x 20 metre canvas.

The timelapse showed another day and Picacasso came in and painted the entire canvas white and began to repaint this canvas one last time.

There's a message there from a great one.

 

[irq506]

I have a policy "No Crop No 'shop". That basically means I take the photo, dev it and scan it flat. meaning that the whites are dull and the blacks muddy, then I use levels and make the blacks black and the whites white. nothing else is touched, I dont crop anything at all ever.
When I printed in darkrooms I did far more to the image then I have ever done (for my own personal work) on the hybrid process -film/scan.
What Im effectively doing is changing the intensity of contrast. Its there on the negative already but I have a consumer grade scanner and cant hope to get the results I need from it so I dont even bother trying.
I dont have any issues with my work methods do you have issues with my work methods?

 

[Kin Lau]

If you feel that taking a digital photo or film shot and sticking it up with "no adjustments" is pure, my goodness, go read (any basic primer will pretty much do) what a digital camera or scanner has to do in order to even see a picture!

Some of this goes back to the mentality and pride of slide shooters, where you must get everything right the first time, where exposure, cropping, composition had to be right the first time, since once the slide is mounted, you couldn't really "edit" anything at all.

There's nothing wrong with being able to pride yourself in getting everything right "in camera". Just like there's nothing wrong with being proud of your darkroom skills (wet or digital).

Being at the right place, right time, right light etc, is not as easy as you think it is.

 

[mcctoronto]

if some people didnt photoshop bad photos into good ones then there would be no need. photoshop gives some people the ability to fake skill. to recreate something they heard was good without even knowing it. they send it to everyone show it off and try play the role of "photographer" as quick as they can. would you feel like a good photographer if you said "whatever i'll just photoshop it later" to everything ? Ive seen it many times.
On the other hand you have the realist who doesnt wanna be that fake. they want to create something they invisoned to begin with not just whatever cool tool they found this time on photoshop. I will always label no photoshop if its something online.. show those mistakes and learn from them. print is another story.
my bone to pick is why everyone is on ansel adams nuts?

 

[irq506]

"By changing aperture you have altered your photo, shutter speed will alter your photo, moving your camera a single centimeter will change your photo"

This is incorrect. You are not altering the photograph, the photograph has not yet been taken, you are merely moving inside the scene you are about to photograph. This is vastly different.
You should study the front pages of newspapers when all the papers in your city cover the same event, because this will give you an insight into how a scene develops itself with the eye in different places.

 

[mcctoronto]

whats the point of buying leicas then? i can just buy a 20 dollar camera and sharp mask and saturate the hell out of it in photoshop.. problem solved!