Not "touching" photos

in the end the final products is what matters... the workflow and how the photographyer/artists/whateveryouwanttocallyourself does it is personal choice...

some will criticise, elevate, worship or condemn the workflow/technique but in the end all that matters is whether or not the resulting image has impact to the viewer...

everything else is noise...
 
varjag said:
Per HCB, "a hunter isn't necessarily a cook", nothing wrong if you're not interested in pixel fiddling :)
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On the nosy. Too often you see dishes with hay and spent rifle cartridges. So to speak, of course. Don't try that at home, kids! :rolleyes:
 
oscroft said:
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.
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Fully agree. Wanted to write the same but couldn't from mobile :)
 
The film purists argument is very shakey

The film purists argument is very shakey

If film and glass lenses are the purest and most honest form of photography, why so many comments about the effects of various lenses. "I prefer this lens because it is contrasty-soft-sharp or has better tonal rendition, etc?" And why do we constantly see comments about film emulsion preferences. "I like Velvia because it is more saturated." "I prefer Ilford over T-max because it ......"

And that's before chemistry choices enter the discussion.

Man has always eventually embraced new tools that make output of product easier, wherein lies the question. Is digital easier... not for all people.

The fact is it's all good.... let's shut off our computers and go shoot some film and capture some digital images. Whoooaaah!!!
 
Just to add a comment about my personal approach. I do very little digital adjustment; just the occasional a bit of sharpening and brightness/contrast adjustment (and cropping - but that's not a digital exclusive). I don't do anything with curves, etc.

But that's not for any purist or idealogical reasons. It's just because I know film and development much better than I know Photoshop (actually, I don't even have Photoshop), and it's the approach that gives me the most pleasure.
 
Agreed. I find nothing wrong w/doing in photoshop what I could (or actually wish I could) do in the darkroom, but I do have an aesthetic problem w/gratuitous tweaking. However, photography is a hobby for me, not a religion, so who am I cast stones @ those evidently think that Thomas Kincaid is a great artist (doesn't stop me from making fun of them, though)?

usagisakana said:
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.
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Hmmm, sounds to me like you're getting worked up over strawmen.

Where the heck are these people you refer to? I know many photographers, personally & via the internet (flickr, etc.) & have yet to meet or correspond w/anyone who actually takes pride in never making any adjustments to their photos or somehow believes that no adjustments are ever acceptable. Or is this just a problem you're running into in Chongqing?

As others have noted, there are many shooters like myself who work @ getting the photo we want "in camera" w/a minimum of cropping & post-processing, but that doesn't mean we're out to denigrate other photographers, only that we take pride in our working method.

Avotius said:
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".
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Avotius, I agree with you.

When you write "One of HCB's most famous photos is a heavy crop", which one do you mean here?
 
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". Avotius

So many Phil. 101 conundrums in this one little paragraph! My goodness! Real world- do we see this with our sight? Uh oh! What is the difference between the relationship of our environment, our eyes, and our brains and those between film/sensor with light reflected off our environment? Didn't even mention time! But that just complicates things...

It could be argued that our personalities are a kind of photoshop! Is it changing for the better or covering up the bad? Or both? Hmmm...

Is not wondering through life with a particular vision, and adhering to it, a form of purity?

Sorry, the Matrix was on TV a couple of nights a go. :)

I think that bottom line is that Photography is an umbrella term. It contains lots of different approaches, often seeming as opposites. Art is one area where we can afford to be relativists. In photography, you can be a before, or you can be an after, or you can be both. I think...

My Dad watches F1 but not NASCAR. That doesn't mean he thinks carburators are crap. NASCAR occasionally lets their drivers make a right turn on one of their tracks. But not many.

There is a point in there somewhere...
 
The most essential editing skill--shared by digi and film shooter alike--is Total Crop (otherwise known as "delete file" or "don't bother printing."
 
I'm lazy. The best I feel like doing when I scan film is to get the contrast right, and cropping a little; which is more or less the same thing I'm doing in the darkroom. I couldn't care less about montage, because I find it tacky, except for the rare (very) example.

As for the "no edit" purity, it depends. Up to a point it's nice to know that what you're seeing on the photo results from something that has actually happened. Up to a point, of course.

It's still generally assumed that pictures have some relationship with reality, even in the 21st century, that making a montage pass for the real thing upsets people.

But I'm not going to pay more for someone's prints just because he has not cropped his neg. Otherwise it ends up being another useless information like the "I adjusted the levels in photoshop" tacked unto every boring shot in Popular Photography. Of course you adjusted the levels, but nobody cares, nor do they think it matters to know you used a 4GB SmashFlashUber CF Card to take your stupid picture!
 
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Avotius said:
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.
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My sense is, at least here on RFF, the majority of posts where people have explicitly stressed the 'purity' of a minimally-manipulated image have stated or implied reasons entirely to do with addressing technical issues of lenses, film, development techniques, etc, and little or nothing to do with the aesthetics of the image itself. So in this sense I disagree with the premise of your post.

OTOH, posts that are strictly intended to be 'no words', non-technical posts of images rarely, if ever, overtly state some particular level of technical manipulation.

Avotius said:
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.
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Uh, that's making a strong leap of logic, into borderline presumption. This site seems to attract discussion of the intricate technical details of, primarily, handheld photography. Those who are interested in engaging in such discussion are not necessarily creative luddites. Many of us are, in fact, literate and skilled in both the aesthetic as well as technical sides of photography. It's just that, like many other photography websites, discussions of aesthetics end up sounding like arguments over religion or politics. Heck, take a poll as to what is each person's definition of 'art', and you'll end up with thousands of different answers, each perhaps different from what was fed to you in art school.

~Joe
 
I enjoy photos that aren't photoshopped just as I enjoy music that wasn't created with digital pitch correction.

I guess this means I'm old.
 
As a caveat, there are those photographers who state their process as a way to define what the viewer is seeing. It's as simple as silver gelatin, giclee, wet plate collodian.. it can be further defined as PS manipulated, uncropped full frame silver print, etc etc.

The BS comes in when any photog touts his process as being superior to any other one. The impact of the end result is all I believe is important.
 
there is a photoshopped image and there is a photoshopped image. sometimes ppl go so overboard that you can tell right away. often its the hdr shots or photos where the lighting is so perfect that you know it can't be real. i don't like such images. its quite fun to look at photos in flickr and try to guess which one has gone through the entire photoshop cycle. its basically the US supreme court understanding of art vs pornography: you know when you see it.

but i don't have any problems with ppl tweaking the curves, cropping, mono-conversions...you know, just the basics.
 
usagisakana said:
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...
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This recalls an observation from a music professor I had in college, paraphrased as: The lone desire to use new technology is the worst possible reason to create art. He then backed up this proclamation by playing a recording made by the then-chair of the MIT music department, who had performed a dreadful(!!) :bang: solo recorder piece using the newly-invented tape-loop reverberation technique.

It amuses me that the most interesting HDR-like work I've seen is the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit on the Library of Congress website, produced from remarkable sets of glass plate negatives nearly a century old. Probably old news to most folk here but worth mentioning again, IMO.
 
Ah, mind-taxing time again. - Marvin

Nothing like a thread of this sort to make me go on a milk-and-cookie run (no cookies here, so have to put on shoes and head to the all-night place across the street) and fortify myself for a reply...

Avotius: I don't know if you're familiar with the Dogma 95 movement in the world of cinema. This came about at a moment when the world of cinema, like still photography, was experiencing seismic shifts in technology, and concerned itself with what it perceived as the diminution of the craft by a boatload of slick, big-budget smoke and mirrors. While I have thought this movement more than a little childish at its extremes (CGI in movies, IMO, isn't exactly evil, just terribly tacky most of the time it's used), I think the movement was important in putting forth the question of what cinema is, and isn't, and can be, and too often doesn't get the chance to be.

Like the world of moving pictures, still photography is based on, and steeped in, technology and its changes. Movies have gone through the silent era, to "talkies", to color (one of the tenets of Dogma 95 is to always shoot in color, because that's based in "reality": raise your hand if you buy this one!), to wide-screen (from CinemaScope to IMAX), to 3D, to digital shooting and projection. Over here, in the still-image world, we've been dealing with the same thing, and haveing the same arguments about art and aesthetics. We've had our own Dogma 95 cliques over the last century (f/64, anyone?), and while the extremes of such movements could devolve into the silly and pointless, the argument sticks at least a little to the psychic ribs of those of us with a minute to listen and ponder.

How I work with images, and ultimately conjure them into prints, is my business, just as your methods are yours. When an image works, it just works; when it simply sucks, no amount of explaining makes it otherwise (in fact, further explanation usually makes it look all the worse). For me, though, the work I create isn't simply something spun from Gossamer onto film or paper: it's a record. A record of where I was, and when, and why. Photography only gets certain facts straight, and in 2D, no less, but it's a pretty good record-keeper nonetheless. This, for me, is important.

Not that I'm just into dry-record-keeping snaps (nothing wrong with that): there is the matter of reording things (hopefully) as I saw and felt them, and that's long been a tricky business. The advent of computers, scanners, and Photoshop have allowed others to get farther away from what they consider "reality", but the same technologies have allowed me to get closer to my reality than I ever could before. In another thread last week, I mentioned my regarding Photoshop as a "transcription" device for my scanned images, a more-precise means to get down as much as I can from that chip of plastic and emulsion. Sometimes, and image can come straight out of the scanner, without any other twiddling, and be the image i want. Sometimes, I need to tweak it: levels, curves, a bit of unsharp mask. One method (or non-method) doesn't pull rank over the other, just as in the wet darkroom.

And, of course, the final judge of what works is me, and me alone. I truly couldn't give a rat's ass what's "current" in the world of photography (maybe this an affliction that hits when you pass 40?). I mainly want to stay vital to myself, and show a little of that around for feedback, good or bad.

No dogma required. But I wouldn't object to developing a secret RFf handshake, just for fun. :)


- Barrett
 
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