Image Manipulation.......

Ai Print said:

I see a lot of garbage that some hack would otherwise call a "fine art landscape" so I use the same strict rules in shooting landscapes as I do in a journalism piece or documentary. So that way, the challenge is to always find something extraordinary, amazing convergences of light or actual moments, reality being far more impressive than someone's lunch break photoshop fantasy.

In fact, this is how I shoot all my work, 99% of it camera, regardless of who the client is.

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hi .. sorry if this comes across as snarky but ...

i understand what you mean but there are armloads, no ... boatloads of
photographers who would consider "clouds in the sky" to be extraordinary convergences
of light or actual moments ... do clouds + cloudscapes count ?

john

Do not follow the "rules" of some other photographer; define and follow your own rules. Adhering ruthlessly to a dogma of perfection of essential elements will only lead to frustration and a perceived lack of objectiveness. For what it's worth though, dramatic clouds and a landscape have long been favoured by legions of photographers, and those that use fauxtoshop are the dreamers who prefer to "cut and paste" elements to suit their imagination rather than get off their bums and do the hard work for which dedicated landscape photographers are renowned and whose reputation rides on their originality and resourcefulness.

Sent from my SM-T805 using Tapatalk

blansky said:

I didn't start this as an anti digital thread obviously, since I shoot digital, and also since analog has the opportunity for manipulation as well.

But instead it's just the dilemma, and perhaps a moral one, in how in this new world, we deal with the mistaken concept of photography as "truth", and as well the reality of how photographs affects perception.

A couple of stories:

http://www.pdnonline.com/news/award...-Photo-Catches-Image-Manipulators-13819.shtml

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/how-photography-can-destroy-reality/

Dead Link Removed

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If you want reality,lookout of the window.if you like art, look at photographs.

RalphLambrecht said:

If you want reality,lookout of the window.if you like art, look at photographs.

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Perhaps. But it misses the point.

Art can either be "reality" or "non reality". Whatever reality is. My reality is probably different from your reality.

Yesterday's documentary photograph (reality I would suppose) can sometimes be considered art (whatever that is). And as such it left the world of "truth" and is now something else, and that something else affects people's perception.

So by the fact of something being considered "art" it's not necessarily a stand alone benign object like a still life or an abstract. It still has the power to cause emotional action in the viewer.

Lets say I took a documentary photograph of the US South around the time of Selma, showing police brutality of blacks. These days that could be in an art gallery being sold as "art". That photograph could easily be two realities. The emotional effect has on people seeing the brutality and add to their hatred of cops, and conversely the satisfaction felt by a white supremacist at the denigration of black people.

So I'd say "art" is not a stand alone entity, it has power in the real world as well.

We all live inside our own fantasies and our perceptions drive our life fantasies. Reality, Art, Documenatry, Tat or whatever. There's no accounting for how each of us will perceive it which is why the arguments go on and on and on and on ad infinitum. Few are are capable of understanding that the next persons peception can and usually is, totally different than their own.

As to the power of a photograph, lets take the photographs of Princess Diana dying in the back of car. I don't think they were ever published, certainly not in the UK, but everyone knows about them and they were headline news for months so they must be Art. Except no one has ever seen them so they must be virtual art that exists only in the perceptions that fuel our fantasies.

The manipulation issue isn't what you do to the photograph. The real manipulation is what the photo does to manipulate or not manipulate the mind of the person viewing it. If his thoughts about an issue is changed to something that a reasonable person would say was not represented in the original scene, then that's a manipulation. That's why it becomes so important in photojournalism. Because "news" effects what we think about issues and what we might support or oppose politically. If the viewer's mind is manipulated to an "un-truth", then that's dangerous and why reputable news media are opposed to editing photos beyond simple cropping and exposure. Even here, if that changes the effect and meaning, a news editor should not publish the photo. Those type of photos should be left to advertising where its expected to present pictures that influence people into doing things they would not otherwise do.

every photograph is manipulated!Framing the shot is already a decision to include or exclude certain subject matter.pointing a bit to the rigt or left can make a whole different photograph.There is neither truth nor reality in photography;never was;assuming reality in a photograph is the problem not the manipulation;that is part of the process.

Alan Klein said:

The manipulation issue isn't what you do to the photograph. The real manipulation is what the photo does to manipulate or not manipulate the mind of the person viewing it. ...

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Exactly. Even though I am half Syrian, when I saw Paul Hansen's photo of the funeral procession, I immediately suspected a bias. Would he show both sides? Would he have photographed a funeral of those who died in a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv restaurant or nightclub?

RalphLambrecht said:

assuming reality in a photograph is the problem not the manipulation

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almost exactly to the point, although I would have not used the word "problem", rather just a fact about the world.

Once again, more is being demanded of (or loaded upon) photography than other media.

When questions are asked about whether a "manipulated" photograph is more or less "real" than one that isn't, at the same time the (false, misleading) assumption is being made that there is such a thing as an unmanipulated photograph.

Ralph points out the manipulations that at a very basic level (framing) the photographer carries out, but the level of "manipulation" goes back much further in the process, to the very basis of photography itself (and it doesn't matter whether it's film or digital).

It's as if the interposition of a complicated manufacturing and chemical engineering process between the eye and the "reality" around us somehow allows penetration of a veil of perception - that a photograph can reveal at least more about things in themselves if not the things in themselves. But a few minutes considering the complexities reveals that this is almost absurd.

One other difficulty in these discussions is of course that the reality of objects and things in the world gets jumbled up with the reality of scenes and situations, and it's not always clear what people are debating, or whether two people arguing are actually addressing the same issues.

Does a photograph of a funeral in Gaza City (let's say I took it, not Hansen) reflect reality? If I crop it bizarrely and print it with so much contrast and solarised that it almost (but only almost) becomes abstract, does it still represent the place and people and objects that were there at the time - does it represent reality? Of course it does.

If I printed it "straight", does it ditto? Of course it does.

If I print it either way, does it represent the political and personal complexities of the participants and the implications of the place and physical symbols represented ? Well, does it?

RalphLambrecht said:

every photograph is manipulated!Framing the shot is already a decision to include or exclude certain subject matter.pointing a bit to the rigt or left can make a whole different photograph.There is neither truth nor reality in photography;never was;assuming reality in a photograph is the problem not the manipulation;that is part of the process.

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Yes every photo is manipulated.

Additionally we don’t see the reality with our eyes, but we create a picture of the reality during perception.
So a photographic picture can show us the photographers’ version of the reality or the photographer is searching with the camera for different versions of the reality.

Aura McKay, a local (digital) photographer whose work I enjoy said at a workshop that she sometimes receives criticism about some of her work because it is obviously a "photograph" (she likes playing with narrow depth of field and other similar techniques). Her response is that she likes photographs that take advantage of the strengths and uniqueness of the photographic medium - she likes photographs that are clearly photographs, not just representations.

My take on it - as photographers, we "select". In the darkroom, we bring out what we have "selected", make it more obvious to our viewers. I think of manipulated photographs more as a lazy way to paint. Not always. It depends. A good illusionist never shows his hand. Most Fauxtoshopped stuff I see is just plain corny, overdone.