The debate has been around since the inception of digital photography and will probably still be raging long after I'm gone. It centers around the difference in "enhanced" digital photographs versus "manipulated" photographs. It's been written and discussed ad infinitum. I've even written about it in previous blogs but some things have happened recently that put a new twist on it for me.
I'll begin by stating my views on the subject. When I upload an image to my computer and launch it in Photoshop or Lightroom I almost always only perform tasks I did in the darkroom. I'll crop the image if necessary, adjust the contrast, adjust the exposure, maybe increase the saturation, and use minimal sharpening. Some of these are necessary because of my technique and some are necessary because of the characteristics of the RAW format that I shoot in. I consider these images to be "enhanced" and they are always my attempt to render the image the way I saw it. There are 2 images on my website currently that have been "manipulated" using Photoshop magic but I knew when I shot them that I would be creating a surreal image in the computer. But the main thing for me is to present the images how I saw them. Not how I imagined them or how I wish I'd have seen them, but what I saw that moved me to create the image.
In that spirit I've always stayed away from filters that alter the perception of colors. Things like color enhancing filters, warming polarizers, or a combination of the two. The results produced by them just doesn't look real to me. I loved Velvia film when I was shooting film but only used it for certain low contrast scenes because of it's not always realistic reproduction of colors. In short, I tend to shy away from anything that changes the faithful reproduction of an image and I'm not a big fan of folks who produce those kind of images.
I also have no respect for photographers that are deceptive in describing their work. For many years I admired the work of Art Wolfe. His Nature and Wildlife photography was an inspiration to me. Then it came out that some of the images in one of his books were manipulated to the point where more animals were added to a herd of zebras to make the patterns look like there were more animals in the herd. I'd just about gotten over it until recently Outdoor Photographer magazine ran a cover shot by Art Wolfe of the moon showing through Delicate Arch in Utah. After much debate it was disclosed that yes, the moon had been added to the image of the arch. In essence, he was portraying things that simply had not occurred.
Not long ago a photographer was disqualified from a prestigious international competition when it was disclosed that his image of a supposedly wild wolf jumping over a fence was, in fact, a shot of a captive animal obeying it's trainer's commands. Again, deceptive.
Now there's the whole debate over HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo processing. I'm no expert but my understanding is that HDR is used to make adjustments in an image where the contrast is naturally too great to render a usable image. But people are getting carried away with it. Most of the time HDR images look pretty good but a lot of HDR's have a strangely unrealistic look. The colors are too saturated or the image is too crisp for what are professed as the conditions.
A recent image by Tom Till falls in this category. In one of his most recent collections of images Mr. Till displays some HDR images. One in particular is unrealistic to the point of being disturbing. His image looking through the window of an abandoned building near the ghost town of Alma is just downright unrealistic yet he declares that the images were reproduced the way he "saw" them. If he truly saw this image in the manner it's presented I'd really like to discuss his point of view. When I first looked at it I felt like I was having an acid flashback. It's simply too crazy looking.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the Photoshop police and I'm not out to bust anyone who uses the tool to it's complete capability. All I'm asking is for people to be honest. If you saw 50 zebras in a herd, show me 50 zebras, not 100 zebras. If you didn't see the moon in that particular place in relation to Delicate Arch, don't tell me you did. If you've photographed a captive animal, don't tell me it's wild. And finally, if your vision of a scene is so ridiculously false, don't portray it as how you saw the image unless you're having an acid flashback. BE HONEST with me.
I mentioned earlier some of the actions I use when processing my digital images. The image accompanying this blog is a perfect example. Here's what I did and why I did it. As I said, I shoot in RAW format which does require some adjustments. The image was cropped to a more panoramic format because I feel it suited the subject. I increased the contrast slightly since RAW files tend to be low contrast. The only thing I did after that was to sharpen the image a little since RAW files are always a bit less than optimum sharpness. Basically I made 3 adjustments to this file. One because of the format I visualized when I saw the image, and the other two to compensate for the RAW format. It really does represent what I saw in the field. And if you have questions about any of my images I'll be happy to disclose my work flow and the reasoning behind it at any time.
In the meantime, anyone know of a couple of incredibly talented photographers out there that I can admire?
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