He shouldn't have photoshopped it if he was going to be embarrassed by the question if he photoshopped it. That's the signal that you went too far. Trust your gut not your head.
My wife says that "should" is a cognitive distortion.
I would argue that the photographer would have been better to have revealed the substitution.
My favorite quote of his, which I will happily mangle, is from a court case concerning mining rights or something of that nature of a mine he had photographed in the West (I assume for the owners). The judge asked his why he picked that particular place to make the photograph. "It was the best view." he replied. However, my favorite photo quote of that era is by Mr. Peter Britt of Jacksonville, Oregon to a woman with a complaint about her portrait, "Madam, if you wish a picture of a pretty face, you'll have to bring one with you.""Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916)"
He barely had orthochromatic materials available to him, if even. He had little chance of capturing a sky even if he wanted to. In that case one could argue adding clouds is more realistic than presenting a blank sky. Fair point though.
Godel's incompleteness theorem applied to art photography. Interesting.
I remember being on a photo forum (not this one) a couple of years ago. Someone displayed a very dramatic scene of a river going through a city with really dramatic clouds. I responded (paraphrased) "did you add the clouds"? Crickets. I followed his Flickr link, and saw many more images with very dramatic skies, some eerily similar to the one in the city, but in different locations. After a few days, I responded to my own response and said (paraphrase), "question answered, I took a look at your Flickr feed. Looks like a lot of your photos have dramatic clouds". A couple days later I got a private message from the poster. He said "I added the clouds".
My main beef about adding skies is they may be skies picked from a library which represent conditions that would NEVER be seen in that locale, or that time of year/day/etc. for instance. Now, if you state these are graphic arts, I guess anything goes (I have done collages for year book pages for my daughters for instance, but it was VERY clear these were a collages). I can also understand a COMMERCIAL photographer, say photographing a house, tastefully adding a few clouds to enhance a scene, or a portrait photographer removing zits on a Senior high school portrait. This is commercial activity, and one needs to please the customer. But in general, I personally prefer to be more conservative about adding/removing elements (and generally do not at all).
Of course William Herbert Mortensen excelled at re-touching pubic hair out of a negative. I believe it raised his images above porn...along the lines of have a plinth in the photo.
Or is "removing tails from all his photographs of hunting dogs" an euphemism for doing Mortensen's trick?
Godel and I are not on speaking terms.
Of course William Herbert Mortensen excelled at re-touching pubic hair out of a negative. I believe it raised his images above porn...along the lines of have a plinth in the photo.
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So you burn and dodge, bleach, stain and filter. And somehow this is not manipulation or, to use your word, "distortion" of the image? You're drawing an artificial line in the sand to justify some kind of moral superiority. I'm not saying you have to like digitally composited/edited/manipulated images - you're free to like or dislike whatever you want. But I'm just calling BS on any claim to purity or moral superiority just because you don't remove offending twigs with the clone tool. George Hurrell heavily retouched his negatives with pencils, razor blades and Kodak Crocein Red to give his actresses that porcelain-perfect skin - are you offended by that? Or is that ok, but doing the same thing in Photoshop is not?Thank you for your concern about my rocks. My rocks are doing well and appreciate your thought on their well being. To your point I choose the camera, lens, filters, if any, film, composition, focus, exposure and development. Once the film has captured the image from the lens, I may burn in or dodge, bleach, stain, ... but I do not tamper with the captured image, so the image is to altered nor distorted. So yes there is a purity that I maintain. Please feel free to distort your photographs, but I am not required to like the results.
If a beer bottle is in the scene move, change lenses or change the composition.
We should all strive to be good environmental stewards and leave the places we visit cleaner than when we came. Unfortunately, sometimes the beer bottle is beyond safe reach.Or, move the beer bottle. Better yet if it is full (and a good beer)- drink it.
I do not particularly like that option...it is way too creepy for me -- it is like pretending the girls are underage, it is really weird.Perhaps a more acceptable method would be to have his models shave?
We should all strive to be good environmental stewards and leave the places we visit cleaner than when we came. Unfortunately, sometimes the beer bottle is beyond safe reach.
I do get Sirius' point about manipulation, really... I'm not a fan of T-Rex, a flying shark and a man meet at a waterfall kind of photos.
Weston often was concerned if pubic hair would show in some of his nudes, because he could get in trouble for distributing pornography and the USPS might destroy them if he tried to mail them. Such were the standards of the day. Lucien Clergue would often not include the model's face in a photo if pubic hair was showing, the French authorities at the time considered it pornography.I do not particularly like that option...it is way too creepy for me -- it is like pretending the girls are underage, it is really weird.
I do not particularly like that option...it is way too creepy for me -- it is like pretending the girls are underage, it is really weird.
We should all strive to be good environmental stewards and leave the places we visit cleaner than when we came. Unfortunately, sometimes the beer bottle is beyond safe reach.
I do get Sirius' point about manipulation, really...
"Manipulation" is skill itself. It is called skill of photography
I mean isn't the goal to tell story, awake feelings, make people want the photo on their wall? Is there are reward how "pure" the photo is? And how is the "pureness" measured?
Just tell me how I can manipulate my film prints to achieve the previous and I will take it to the max - no questions.
How about if I take a photograph, print it on canvas, then sign my name on it in paint, and maybe even add a few brush strokes. Can I sell that as a painting?
Yes, if it is of Elvis!How about if I take a photograph, print it on canvas, then sign my name on it in paint, and maybe even add a few brush strokes. Can I sell that as a painting?
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