• Welcome to Photrio!
    Registration is fast and free. Join today to unlock search, see fewer ads, and access all forum features.
    Click here to sign up

Ctein and The Online Photographer "part ways"...

Stephen Prunier said:
I think too many people compare analog/digital as apples to apples, when it's way beyond that now. I don't think one is better than the other. I just don't think there both apples anymore!.
Click to expand...

I'm confused by why so many digital artists take offense when people want to call it digital art, or seemingly want to call it Photography to hide that they did serious digital manipulation. The latter is where I have the biggest issue.
 
I think too many people argue about labels rather than making images ;-)
 
My personal opinion HDR looks horrible. Adding things like skies and clouds into images is fake and horrible. Massive amounts of saturation slider is horrible and fake. Good quality digital photographs can be very good but people get crazy with the easy to use digital editing tools. Give me a blurry grainy honest shot any day. That to me is a perfect photo.
 
Regardless, a good illusionist never shows his hand. Even whimsical stuff by Uelsmann looks seamless in the prints. Most of these Fauxtoshop tricks
have become such a fad that an avalanche of pretentiously corny adolescent "art" was inevitable. I remember when likeminded arsty types in the
60's and 70's were doing it with scissors and glue, and rephotographing the comp, but often with less skill than the National Equirer used for proving
Liz Taylor's head had been transplanted onto Bigfoot. I have no problem with Photoshop as a tool kit. But a tool in the hands of a fool turns it into
Fauxtoshop. Things just start looking fake, cheap, kitchy.
 
Tempest in a teapot. I read the original "Photoart" article and it seemed reasonable and innocuous. Ctein got offended. Oh well.
 
Ctein is a friendly and interesting fellow with a distinct interest in technical topics. I should probably visit him again. Recently he's done of a bit of a career shift into Sci Fi novels. Just like most of us, he can be opinionated on ideas he's passionate about. He's a superb digital printing technician,
and was probably the last person on the planet to professionally do Kodak pan matrix dye transfer printing (from color negs, versus chromes).
 
Richard S. (rich815) said:
No where near the extent or extreme as its done now. Not even the same league.
Click to expand...
You'd be surprised at the complexity of things labs could do in the line of image compositing. I was on the team that developed the Kodak Premier Image Enhancement System (film in - film out) and spent a lot of time in commercial labs in the late '80s seeing what they did and was always amazed. Digital just made it faster.
 
I've always been an admirer of the legendary mountain photogapher Vittoria Sella. He packed that 18 inch plate camera halfway up Chogolisa opposite K2. But on the way he also took a shot looking back on the panorama of previous peaks, with the Baltoro glacier snaking the whole way too.
He liked to include a few people in scenes for a sense of scale. And in this scene there was a roped string of climbers in the middle distance, looking
tiny in the vast surrounding, yet evidently working hard uphill on the glacier if you looked at them closely. Then somebody discovered the original
negative back in Italy, and discovered that there were no climbers in the shot. But that identical string of climbers did show up in a negative he had
taken in the Alps twenty years before! Then some measurments were taken, which means that even though they appeared tiny in the final print,
they would have each had to be about eighteen feet tall to equate to the actual scene! Photoshop long long before Photoshop.
 
I worked at BGM Imaging in the 80's as a photocomp technician, we were montaging up to 50 images on a single sheet of film, I and Bllindpig here on APUG were two of the few Lisle Camera Operators in North America to do computer assisted montage. The Premier was the next step in the loop and was a mind blowing system. Now its PS to lambda for me but I am still using the montage stripping skills I learned making tri colour gums today.
 
Prof_Pixel said:
... I was on the team that developed the Kodak Premier Image Enhancement System (film in - film out) and spent a lot of time in commercial labs in the late '80s seeing what they did and was always amazed. Digital just made it faster.
Click to expand...

Not only faster, but made such manipulations easier and available to everyone. Consequently, we have an entire generation who can't make a straight photo without having to tweak it for maximum HDR, saturated colors, and +3 sharpening. They can't make a photo and be happy with it untouched or just mildly adjusted (e.g. cropping, contrast). Some do this because they think its supposed to be done all the time on all images.

I don't think anyone's arguing that film photos were never modified or manipulated. If people enjoy manipulating their images, that's fine. It's just another aspect of the broad spectrum of visual arts - like impressionism, cubism, photorealism, or whatever. Have fun. Mike Johnston's distinction of photography and photoart makes sense to me.
 
Last edited:
Theo Sulphate said:
Consequently, we have an entire generation who can't make a straight photo without having to tweak it for maximum HDR, saturated colors, and +3 sharpening.
Click to expand...
It's always a matter of GIGO, isn't it. When I was demonstrating the then new d approach using an Eikonix Designmaster workstation, depending on the group, I used the clone function to start to remove the bathing suit top of a model kneeling in side-view. I'd stop and say, "I need to supply missing detail, and I'm an engineer, not an artist" to make the point that using the new tools still required artistic skills.
 

Likewise, for many years I was involved in very serious digital manipulation of images where the goal was to leave no easily detectable trace of manipulation. To me, that was actually enjoyable and an art form in itself.
 

I was going to add some to the thread but your post above is about 99% of what I was going to say. So.... +1.
 
i dont' think it is so much that they can't take a straight photograph, i think most people now have ADD
so they have to be fiddling with something they dont' know when to stop.
everyone seems to be chasing perfection even if it doesnt' exist.
 
What separates the men from the boys is learning judicious restraint. Every time some new imaging technological tool comes out, people go hog wild
with it simply because they can. Analogously, not everyone becomes a decent chef just because ample ingredients are on hand. The way many people
treat Photoshop is equivalent to throwing a whole sack of sugar into a single pie mix just because it it there, or fifty pounds of salt into a single pan of french fries.
 

Or using frozen berries in a dessert you prepared but letting people think you used fresh, and that you picked them yourself. Or serving a wonderful salmon dish claiming (or letting people think) you caught the fish when actually it was store bought. The results might be practically the same in the end but isn't there something inherently wrong with that, even subtlety so? "Hey Fred, those people think you caught that fish yourself and are more impressed with the dish because of that, aren't you going to say something?" "Nah, why bother...."
 
Prof_Pixel said:
It's been ever such since the earliest days of photography.
Click to expand...

No ones arguing or surprised by that. It's the extent and commonality of use today that unprecedented.
 
just trying to figure this out ...
"heavy?" manipulation =photoart, otherwise it is photography ...

would jerry uelsmann combination-work, or
bob carnie's solarized pt/pd-gumovers, or
yousuf karsh / george hurrell's portraits or
brian kasoff's landscapes be considered "photoart" and not "photography" ?

is there a litmus test for determining where the cut off is because it seems to me
that all photography is heavily manipulated, even straight photography or robot surveillance work.
it is what cameras, darkrooms and people using them are all about ...
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register