Comment by foxglacier
1 day ago
Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains? I think that would be called photoshopped and fake, but here they're describing manually selecting the background and adjusting its contrast so it ends up looking like it couldn't look in real life. Is that qualitatively better for something?
I guess I'm wondering what's the goal of making these kinds of picture? If it's just to produce the output, why not combine separate photos so you can get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want without having to find them co-occurring naturally? If it's to follow some kind of rules for not cheating, why not do no hand-editing in software?
Some people might think so. In an art class a professor once told us that all photography can be a lie whether edited or not. Consider:
Let's say I took a picture of a old man beating a child with a cane.
In the video version of the photo I zoom out, and it's clearly a stage performance.
Or I take a picture of a man frowning in front of a demolished home.
In the video version the man happened to be walking by a construction of a new home and I said something to get his attention and snapped the photo on moody black and white film.
Framing is curating reality and you can evoke certain emotions or messages simply by what you choose to keep in and leave out of your frame.
> Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains?
This has been a concern people have had for years. You might benefit from reading Susan Sontag's essay On Photography - https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Sontag-Susan-Photography.p...
My take, as soon as you pick up a camera to capture a scene you are telling a story and incorporating your own bias. For this reason, once I learned how cameras worked and dabbled in photography as an amateur it really transformed how I consume media. You could have the same subject and scene but tell a completely different story depending on the decisions you make as a photographer.
I was highly disappointed with Sontag's piece because it felt dismissive of the joy and craft of painting with light. As the tools available for faking it have become ubiquitous, and the bias more up front and center, I've come to find her conclusions overly reductive. My favorite photography is earnest, which she considers inconsequential.
> joining them together in software
What if they were joined together by exposing 2 different overlapping film negatives?
You may enjoy "Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop"
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Faking_it/nGvTg_HC32YC?...
> get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want
Digital painting? Too difficult, maybe just use Firefly "Adobe's online AI image generator" ;-)
> ends up looking like it couldn't look in real life.
Eyes are subjective. The goal of manual post processing is often to make an image that replicates what the photographer saw, which is rarely possible with the automatic processing the camera does.
(Image data is always processed. No human can see raw photon counts.)
You mean people's brains selectively enhance the contrast of the mountains so he's trying to reproduce that perception?
In these cases, it's clearly not to replicate what the photographer saw with his unaided eyes because he wouldn't have been able to see such detail so far away. Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?
A lot of photographers here. Do you guys impose some kind of personal restrictions on what types of processing or instruments you use to make it "honest" or not-cheating? How does that work?
> Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?
The experience is bigger than "saw".
Is it to hint at what they felt?
Later, looking at a purely-2d-visual representation is a different kind of experience than being there.
Yes, people's brains selectively modify contrast, saturation, detail, framing, and just about every parameter there is.
When it comes to visual experiences, it is meaningless to talk about "honesty" because they are so subjective. That's one of the greatest joys of looking at other photographers' interpretations of familiar subjects: they see things so differently.
Restrictions on processing make sense, but they are not easy rules, because they depend on the purpose of the image. I suspect the most restricted are people in news -- they operate on similar principles as those who write the articles. In other words, there are no forbidden technical procedures, but the end product must effectively convey a real-world event (from some perspective -- news is always biased.)
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