I just picked up issue 95 of Digital Photographer and read an article about enhancing details of the sky. Hummm, I thought a little post processing, no harm, right?
Well I was shocked to find that the article proposed layering images from separate photographs to accomplish this task. WHAT? A photograph is one shot not a crummy sky shot layered with a better stock photo sky shot as the article suggested. This is not Photography, it is DIGITAL ART. Some may contest that HDR is digital art; however, I disagree. In using HDR, multiple shots of the SAME context is layered to imitate what the eye actually sees – see my blog post to Photoshop or not to…
To blatantly take a sky, or any other part, from one image, whether you took the shot or not and layer it into another image you may or may not have shot is a kind of plagerism. Call me a purist or whatever you want. Digital software is quickly blurring the line between photography and digital art and frankly don’t like it. I’m going to rant to the editor about my opinion – maybe you’ll see it in an upcoming issue. I do still like this magazine, just a little peeved at this particular article.
Ever ask yourself why you take pictures?
I suspect many of you do so to capture the moment of a vacation, party, family, etc. etc. etc. For professionals, it’s about bringing home the bacon. Recently, I spent some time with my sister and talked about what we like to shoot and why. My mind’s been churning on this for several days now.
A client hires a professional to take pictures, often with little or no leeway in what you shoot or how you shoot it. Blessed be the client who trusts in your artistic abilities. For those selling photographs in stores, at fairs or galleries (include me in this category), we are again asked to look at what others like more than what we want to shoot.
I find it difficult to balance this reality as I prefer to shoot what I like and hope it sells rather than always look at its income potential.
I remember the first time someone asked me whether I had enhanced one of my photographs. Without hesitation I answered, “What you see is what I saw”. Except in the fun, jovial moments of morphing images, my work involves recreating what I saw, the moment I chose to take the picture.
I’ve been reading a book on Light and Exposure and reading through the details helped me understand the idea of enhancing images. In a nutshell, technology cannot capture what the eye sees, those fine subtleties that only the human eye can convey. I don’t expect technology can ever recreate the wonders of our biological systems – scientists will continue to try – and believe there are some things we’ll never be able to recreate. The number of sensors in the human eye far outnumber those the best digital camera or slow-speed film can hold. Thank goodness though for that same technology that can give people sight.
At the end of my first photography class, my teacher invited Ansel Adam’s curator to show off some of that work. He flipped over Moonrise over Hernandez and pointed to at least 10 areas where the original image was altered (dodged and burned) during the development process. Since the dawn of photography, the development process has involved some level of human intervention, some radical, some subtle, but all in the pursuit of capturing some level of photographic emotion.
Enjoy those moments when an image speaks to you, independent of whether the image was altered or not. Appreciate how those images trigger feelings.
