'Purist' photography
I thought of publishing the following rant I made on Chicanelk's photo on flickr...
With all due respect, the whole 'purist' talk in digital photography is a (imho) fool's premise. Discussing about that the camera actually 'sees' when taking the shot would lead us in to a completely different direction ... so lets not try to go in to CMOS/CCD sensors and different manufacturer's specs.. :-) In short, once the photo is imprinted on the sensor, to call it 'reality' would be a fallacy to start with.
I also disagree with the parallels drawn between raw unprocessed digital photos and the 'good old days' of chemical processing. I think I am qualified to comment on this because I have done it my self. ie I have developed my own negatives in a dark room and also done the photo processing myself as well. Well true, if you are not serious about photography you just naively give the film roll to the studio/processing house and the next day you come and collect the prints and be blissfully ignorant about what happened to your film roll canister while you were away. Actual 'photographers' do things a bit differently :-) With chemical film, you don't have too many options when developing the film roll (there are a number of different 'standard' processes defined by the likes of Kodak, Fuji etc) . You have already preselected the ISO of the film roll so cannot tweak anything there. This is quite similar to the RAW image or JPEG that comes out of your digital camera. But actually making prints out of the negative is a very creative process. The old school way of processing colour prints is to have an enlarger and exposing your photo paper under the three different primary colours and giving a chemical bath to process each of the primary colours separately, then you finally seal of the print with finisher. The amount of time you expose each colour, the intensity of the lamp etc are all in the total control of the person processing the prints. This is exactly equivalent to manipulating the curves or levels in photoshop for digital prints. Apart from this, there are many other dodge/burn masking effects you could do and is and was done with chemical processing. Photoshop provides many of these 'chemical print processing' effect plus a few more options.
I hope I have explained enough why I consider the 'if you touch your digital print with photoshop, thats not reality' argument a bit silly :-)
Photography is an art (even documentary photography, mind you!) and it's totally at the discretion of the photographer how he/she wants to represent a scene/subject/event, this is true regardless of whether you shoot digital or film. In the pre-digital era, everyone didn't have the financing and/or technical know how to process/print your own photos chemically. In that sense nearly all of us did depend on the guy at the processing lab and his big processing machine (Even the processing machines needs a parameter set to control the exposure settings) to come up with a good result. But nowadays with digital photography and so many tools (Photoshop/Lightroom - even Picasa for that matter) all of us have the chance to play 'professional photographer processing your own prints' :-) It's a pity that most of us don't realize that and live in a 'purist ' cave...:-)
With all due respect, the whole 'purist' talk in digital photography is a (imho) fool's premise. Discussing about that the camera actually 'sees' when taking the shot would lead us in to a completely different direction ... so lets not try to go in to CMOS/CCD sensors and different manufacturer's specs.. :-) In short, once the photo is imprinted on the sensor, to call it 'reality' would be a fallacy to start with.
I also disagree with the parallels drawn between raw unprocessed digital photos and the 'good old days' of chemical processing. I think I am qualified to comment on this because I have done it my self. ie I have developed my own negatives in a dark room and also done the photo processing myself as well. Well true, if you are not serious about photography you just naively give the film roll to the studio/processing house and the next day you come and collect the prints and be blissfully ignorant about what happened to your film roll canister while you were away. Actual 'photographers' do things a bit differently :-) With chemical film, you don't have too many options when developing the film roll (there are a number of different 'standard' processes defined by the likes of Kodak, Fuji etc) . You have already preselected the ISO of the film roll so cannot tweak anything there. This is quite similar to the RAW image or JPEG that comes out of your digital camera. But actually making prints out of the negative is a very creative process. The old school way of processing colour prints is to have an enlarger and exposing your photo paper under the three different primary colours and giving a chemical bath to process each of the primary colours separately, then you finally seal of the print with finisher. The amount of time you expose each colour, the intensity of the lamp etc are all in the total control of the person processing the prints. This is exactly equivalent to manipulating the curves or levels in photoshop for digital prints. Apart from this, there are many other dodge/burn masking effects you could do and is and was done with chemical processing. Photoshop provides many of these 'chemical print processing' effect plus a few more options.
I hope I have explained enough why I consider the 'if you touch your digital print with photoshop, thats not reality' argument a bit silly :-)
Photography is an art (even documentary photography, mind you!) and it's totally at the discretion of the photographer how he/she wants to represent a scene/subject/event, this is true regardless of whether you shoot digital or film. In the pre-digital era, everyone didn't have the financing and/or technical know how to process/print your own photos chemically. In that sense nearly all of us did depend on the guy at the processing lab and his big processing machine (Even the processing machines needs a parameter set to control the exposure settings) to come up with a good result. But nowadays with digital photography and so many tools (Photoshop/Lightroom - even Picasa for that matter) all of us have the chance to play 'professional photographer processing your own prints' :-) It's a pity that most of us don't realize that and live in a 'purist ' cave...:-)
posted by Navinda at 11:44 PM
6 Comments:
I's a personal taste issue. I can appreciate photographs that have filters and all sorts of trickery to create special effects in them. Of course this takes skill and talent to achieve. But I love the idea of capturing a pure moment. No it's not a real moment once it hits the memory of the digital camera or even when it hit the old fashioned film. Personally I prefer photography that is pure because it is the photographer pitting his witts and skills against nature against force,energy and light and that to me is exciting and makes the photograph that emerges much more inspiring and beautiful. I want the natural occurance of light used to create a photograph that is made of the real but that transends the real moment without having to manipulate it after the button has been pressed. To bend the tool of the camera to your own will and reflect the light into something more than just what you see through the viewer. When I see a photograph that has been altered to make it more I appreciate it's beauty and the skill required to create it but I yearn to capture that moment raw in nature. I believe that those moments of exqusite beauty in nature exist and that they are far more stunning than any photoshop,filter
or digital program could ever achieve. But those moments are so rare and last only for seconds even less in real time and to catch them with a camera is near impossible and yet that is what I must do what I must see.
ninj:)
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I see nothing wrong with a person using photoshop or another program to alter their photos, after all art is art, and if manipulation of images is part of how they choose to express their art I don't have a problem with it any more than I have a problem with another (non photographic) artist using CAD or even paintbrush to create images.
However, I do prefer to limit my own processing of photos. I will crop to obtain a specified size, I will remove red-eye, but rarely do I manipulate my photos further.
The exception to this is when it is a "snapshot" type of print meant to preserve a memory, and the lighting at the time was so poor that the photo is underexposed and hard to see, I will then turn up the exposure to be able to preserve the memory... but in my "artistic" photographs, I do very little, if any manipulation, and if I do any at all, I always indicate that when I publish the photo on my blog or share it with others in person.
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The follow up to the original post appears here: http://navindak.blogspot.com/2007/04/follow-up.html#links
Makes sense to continue discussion from there :-)
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