The follow up...
This is the follow up after the response to my earlier comment...
:-) with all due respect, if one thinks that adjusting levels and rotating/cropping is not part of photography, then they don't know much about photography to start with. As I tried to explain in my earlier post, in film era photography, all these cropping/rotating/adjusting levels at the print processing stage was considered the bread and butter of pro, semi-pro, and enthusiast photographers. But I can understand someone who has no clue about how the chemical era photography worked, coming to the conclusion that adjusting levels/rotating/cropping is 'not photography' :-)
I don't even consider these as 'post production' but as an integral part of the photography production. If you want to draw parallels with the chemical/film photography, then it would be as follows:
If you want to be in the same level as a person using a point and shoot 35mm camera who gets his prints through some colour lab (btw I won't call this level as photography) then calling whatever that comes out of your digital camera as the final photograph is justifiable.
But if you want to be compared to a chemical film 'photographer' who does his/her own developing in a darkroom or developing kit and process his/her own prints, then in the digital era, doing level adjustments, crop/rotating just comes naturally.
For me 'post production' is something done beyond level tweaking crop/rotating (while these are considered part of the 'production' not 'post production') . For example, an artwork on a magazine cover would be 'post produced'.
And I am sorry to say, the 75% you mentioned, either doesn't know how to do it or are too lazy :-)
Sorry if I am sounding harsh... but I am having a bad day...
:-) with all due respect, if one thinks that adjusting levels and rotating/cropping is not part of photography, then they don't know much about photography to start with. As I tried to explain in my earlier post, in film era photography, all these cropping/rotating/adjusting levels at the print processing stage was considered the bread and butter of pro, semi-pro, and enthusiast photographers. But I can understand someone who has no clue about how the chemical era photography worked, coming to the conclusion that adjusting levels/rotating/cropping is 'not photography' :-)
I don't even consider these as 'post production' but as an integral part of the photography production. If you want to draw parallels with the chemical/film photography, then it would be as follows:
If you want to be in the same level as a person using a point and shoot 35mm camera who gets his prints through some colour lab (btw I won't call this level as photography) then calling whatever that comes out of your digital camera as the final photograph is justifiable.
But if you want to be compared to a chemical film 'photographer' who does his/her own developing in a darkroom or developing kit and process his/her own prints, then in the digital era, doing level adjustments, crop/rotating just comes naturally.
For me 'post production' is something done beyond level tweaking crop/rotating (while these are considered part of the 'production' not 'post production') . For example, an artwork on a magazine cover would be 'post produced'.
And I am sorry to say, the 75% you mentioned, either doesn't know how to do it or are too lazy :-)
Sorry if I am sounding harsh... but I am having a bad day...
posted by Navinda at 11:49 PM
6 Comments:
I agree with Navinda. He's absolutely right about the good old days. Had you guys have done manual processing in a dark room of your own (which I have done too) you wouldn't have been making these comments in the first place.
Having said that, well... as Upali has mentioned it is indeed the greatest achievement of a photographer *if* he/she can get the perfect crop/exposure on-shot. But that ain't practical my friends. The standard practice is that you put your fullest effort in taking a good composition. Then you make it a great shot in production. If you guys do RAW shooting this is evident as the RAW processor in a computer program (such as the Adobe RAW converter) lets you process photos in a similar fashion to the good old days + with lots of additional features.
Post-production is in essence when you manipulate chrome outside the hue wheel. So adjusting levels (to a certain degree) doesn't always fall in to post production. Cropping is totally not post-production.
I also find it a little humorous to believe 75% of real photographers disagree with post-production. Well... post-production is what makes most of their lives easier in these days. Even photography competitions allow you to do adjustments to your image in restrictive ways.
Cheers.
Hmm .. 'purist'-talk never fails to fascinate. But in professional photography it is unfortunately completely off the point. What counts is the result, not the process. Whether you achieve your results with a pin-hole camera or a large format camera with a high-res drum-scanner and three hours of post-processing is completely irrelevant. There are no blessed or condemned methods in professional photography. You want to achieve a certain result and you use (or try to find) the tools which will get you there - it's a simple as that :-)
On the other hand there are many communities which are experimenting with 'new' methods or restricting themselves to a specific set of tools (like the 'LOMO' photographers for example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography). This can be fun, but it has little in common with end-result-oriented photography.
Other people jumping on a similar topic elsewhere:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/canberra_act/discuss/72157594533278999/
More professionals discussing the topic:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ngproinvitation/discuss/72157600052427574/
Digital manipulations galore! (done by professionals of course;-))
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ngproinvitation/discuss/72157600031719207/
Morality in photography:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ngproinvitation/discuss/72157594587576625/
Thank you Kaidohmaru/Tesis for the above links!
...and more:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/just-say-yes.shtml
I completely agree with Navinda. Adjusting levels and cropping is what every print lab does (the cheap labs typically leave that to some "smart" auto processor program, so the result can be rather random). I once got the same photo printed at an AGFA lab, and at a Kodak lab. The AGFA print had a warm sunset-like feel to it, the Kodak print had a blue tint and looked like midday sun, with overdone saturation. So much for accuracy of "don't touch it".
As Tesis said, some people like to restrict themselves artificially. I used to shoot slide film, which does that. The low dynamic range of slide film forces one to meter very precisely, and there is no possibility for post-shot adjustments - press the trigger, and that was it. If successful, the results can look spectacular on a big projection screen. But is this more "real" than a digital image, with lots of darkroom work, that basically yields the same result (or an even better result)?
The argument of purists that they capture the scene as it was is flawed - they might capture it as the camera saw it, but that is totally different from what the photographer saw, and what the scene actually was. Human vison has a far greater dynamic range than film and is far more adaptable. We don't notice what the colour temperature is, because we adapt. Take a photo and be surprised how "orange" or "blue" it looks. What matters is the result - the photographer saw something when he/she took the photo, and it is part of the process to try and achieve that effect in the final result. It's not post-production, it is processing - trying to adjust the picture so that it looks like the scene the photographer remembered (or even further, what the photographer as the artist wants to achieve). If that means taking 20 panorama shots in 5 different exposures to capture the full dynamic range, and then stitch them all together to a huge HDR panorama and tone-map it to something that looks natural, so be it. The camera is just a tool, and so are tripods, special films, flashes, reflectors, digital processing, etc.
I even think there is not really a line between realistic photography and artistically modified photos. What counts is if people like the artistic result or not. The only area where one really has to be careful is journalistic photography. In my opinion a journalistic photographer should try the best to make the photo look like the actual scene - artistic adjustments are only allowed if they do not alter the facts of what is portrayed. Here cropping can be misinformation, selective focus can be misleading, and pasting things together from other photos is most likely not ok. Of course a photo will never give a factual representation, and will always pick out a particular aspect, but I think the photographer in this case should have a clear conscience about the end result of the photo.
So (with that last exception) what counts is only the final presentation of the photo, as projection, print, or on a website. Depending on the mode of presentation the adjustments to the same photo can be quite different. When it comes to realism, I think what counts in the end is if people accept it as realistic. This can go both ways - it can be a highly technical shot, with 5 flash heads, reflectors, filters, and 10 hours in the lab, and it looks completely natural. Or it can be just a camera on a tripod, and people still won't believe it is a real photo - like that famous shot of the Perth beach, showing fireworks, a lightning in a thunderstorm, and McNaught's Comet all in the same shot.
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