is photography supposed to be reality ?

[Sirius Glass]

Sorry to hear that you camera club is so fractious you don't feel you can have an honest discussion. I wouldn't waste my time on it.

Well said. One of many reasons I gave up going to camera clubs.

 

[MattKing]

Sorry to hear that you camera club is so fractious you don't feel you can have an honest discussion. I wouldn't waste my time on it.

I expect it's like family dinners and politics. As long as you don't bring up the latter, the former go well.
My experience is that if a camera club member is a good photographer, comfortable in their own areas of skill and experience, they are much more likely to be accepting of and even interested in how my approach may differ from theirs.
I am a member of a photographic group that will be hanging a new show at the end of this month (I'm working right now on my prints). Ten of us will be showing this time, and I expect that it will work out to about 40 "images". My prints will be the only darkroom prints. Three others in the group sometimes use film, but only one of those sometimes prints in the darkroom.
We all do really different things. There is a lot of experience and a lot of creativity and a lot of generosity in the group.
When discussions start focusing on things like Photoshop tools, I tend to "Zone" out a bit, but mostly we talk about photographs, and projects, and light, and colour and a lot about printing (of all sorts of types) and presentation and framing etc., etc.
There is a lot of reality in all that.
Here is are website: http://tabularasaartists.com/

 

[blockend]

Using a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky is not the same as cloning in a sky

That can be true. A pink filter on the other hand...

Their theory now is just shoot and we'll fix it in Photoshop.

There lies madness.

You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Should be illuminated in every viewfinder, the opening screen credit of Adobe.

But it would be helpful if we acknowledge it to be let's say computer art rather than a photograph

It's graphic design, the manipulation of images to resemble something commercial. What's scary is all those old hands were waiting for this stuff all along. Nobody died but good taste lies mortally wounded.

 

[removed account4]

Don't know about "supposed to be". Supposed to be by whom? To what purpose?

I think every photograph is real. Even the digital ones (not in the material sense though) are real. How can they not be real? Its there. Of course if real for you is defined as "material" it may not be. But that's a very naive interpretation. The moment it can be thought, it's real. Its manifested as connections in at least one brain. Very real.

To the school of thought that photographs depict reality: so what's a photograph of a photograph then? Also what about photographs of a neuron which has been injected with fluorescent virus. Its not depicting "reality" at all. That logic breaks down there. No, no, there can only be one answer: every photograph is unreal or real. I vote for real

hi -andi
no not asking if photographs or photography or negatives or files are real
they obviously are or at least seem to be tanbible in some way shape or form
and they can be manipulated and a positive image created ...
im saying when a camera makes an exposure and what is clearly infront of the camera, well
its not there as if it is INVISIBLE that is similar to a photograph of something that does not exist in reality ...
the tree i linked to was clearly there. i could have carved my innitials in it i could have smashed my car into it
but clearly it did or does not exist in the photograph i took... i have made other photographs where things vanish
where people change too ... how could a camera only depict reality when the reality infront of the camera does not present it self
in its entirety on the film or paper negative ..

john

 

[faberryman]

the tree i linked to was clearly there. i could have carved my innitials in it i could have smashed my car into it
but clearly it did or does not exist in the photograph i took... i have made other photographs where things vanish...

Draws into question your credentials as a HABs photographer I would think.

 

[Sirius Glass]

...
When discussions start focusing on things like Photoshop tools, I tend to "Zone" out a bit, but mostly we talk about photographs, and projects, and light, and colour and a lot about printing (of all sorts of types) and presentation and framing etc., etc.
There is a lot of reality in all that.
Here is are website: http://tabularasaartists.com/

Ansel Adams and Minor White or Twilight?

 

[removed account4]

Draws into question your credentials as a HABs photographer I would think.

I use a different camera! and I verify every view...

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Scott Kelby does a Ted Talk about a shot he did in Italy; romantic villa/lotsa nature/good light. Upon showing it to the family he noticed something he did not see when he made the capture; telephone poles and power lines.

Were I to develop that image I would lose the poles and lines; that was my reality when I saw it; my vision.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Scott Kelby does a Ted Talk about a shot he did in Italy; romantic villa/lotsa nature/good light. Upon showing it to the family he noticed something he did not see when he made the capture; telephone poles and power lines.

Were I to develop that image I would lose the poles and lines; that was my reality when I saw it, my vision.

OR one could use a wide angle lens and move in OR learn to look at the viewfinder before snapping away.

 

[removed account4]

Scott Kelby does a Ted Talk about a shot he did in Italy; romantic villa/lotsa nature/good light. Upon showing it to the family he noticed something he did not see when he made the capture; telephone poles and power lines.

Were I to develop that image I would lose the poles and lines; that was my reality when I saw it, my vision.

totally understood
but that is a human intervention ( cropping after or before the fact )
i didn't intervene other than doing a long exposure
IDK maybe this is more of a
spiritualist sort of thing than a photography sort of thing
sorry to have started this thread
because it has been interpreted as some sort
of malfunction of my nearly 40 years of using light meter or sunny11
or photoshoph hoax &c

oh well ...

 

[Berkeley Mike]

OR one could use a wide angle lens and move in OR learn to look at the viewfinder before snapping away.

Perhaps. Yet the story speaks to jnanian's image of the tree in the storm. It is about what people "see." Beauty in the eye of beholder, a face only a mother could love, the error of eye-witness accounts.

 

[Vaughn]

Something I came across in my reading today -- consider substituting the words 'photography' and 'images', respectively, for the words, 'words'.

"For a happy marriage between reality and words, reality must be honored with words that revel its nature."

Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything, page 103. The context relates specifically to his writing style/philosophy and I am still digesting it.

 

[Doc W]

Is photography supposed to be reality? The short answer is "yes" but it is also "no."

 

[removed account4]

believe half of what you hear and none of what you see

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Diana Arbus was taking pictures of not usual people who were handled as next to criminal. Her pictures were one of the triggers to get them normal life. This thread is full of very narrow minded, who aren't capable to realize what reality was described not by BW images, but by formulas. This is how humanity made it to the Moon. By formulas in BW. But local caveman will insist it never happened.

 

[Dali]

Diana Arbus was taking pictures of not usual people who were handled as next to criminal. Her pictures were one of the triggers to get them normal life. This thread is full of very narrow minded, who aren't capable to realize what reality was described not by BW images, but by formulas. This is how humanity made it to the Moon. By formulas in BW. But local caveman will insist it never happened.

Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof...

 

[removed account4]

Diana Arbus was taking pictures of not usual people who were handled as next to criminal. Her pictures were one of the triggers to get them normal life. This thread is full of very narrow minded, who aren't capable to realize what reality was described not by BW images, but by formulas. This is how humanity made it to the Moon. By formulas in BW. But local caveman will insist it never happened.

i have a pretty open mind, not sure if you are referring to me or not ..
i was wondering if you could comment on your other post about the work of HCB...
as mentioned previously, im intersted in this sort of thing because ... well
it facinates me that reality and things that dont' seem like reality are simultaneously
captured on film paper &c with a camera. and for me at least it makes me wonder how concrete
reality actually is if in just a few seconds what seemed solid is made of jell-o

thanks !
john

 

[Sirius Glass]

Diana Arbus was taking pictures of not usual people who were handled as next to criminal. Her pictures were one of the triggers to get them normal life. This thread is full of very narrow minded, who aren't capable to realize what reality was described not by BW images, but by formulas. This is how humanity made it to the Moon. By formulas in BW. But local caveman will insist it never happened.

Can someone please translate this into modern English?

 

[removed account4]

Can someone please translate this into modern English?

what is it you don't get? makes perfect sense to me ....
it just doesn't explain why my camera sometimes photographs with a mind of its own ...

 

[cowanw]

IDK maybe this is more of a
spiritualist sort of thing than a photography sort of thing
sorry to have started this thread
because it has been interpreted as some sort
of malfunction of my nearly 40 years of using light meter or sunny11
or photoshoph hoax &c.

You have made me feel badly if you think that I have called into question your nearly 40 years of using light meter or sunny11. I did not. Clearly the picture was composed and exposed as you wished and perfectly well done for that picture. I was however suggesting if the tree trunk was the object then a better set of choices could have been made for that purpose; Just the tree trunk.
Even so, I still do, in fact, see the tree trunk, just to the left of the door is a white line and then to the left of that, black; the trunk. The fact that in between the tree and the lens is a combination of things, rain, twigs, mist, dirty window, what ever, does not make this a metaphysical photograph. Actually more of a pictorialist picture, I think

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Is photography supposed to be reality? The short answer is "yes" but it is also "no."

Photography is NOT reality - it is a simulacrum of reality, only some of the time. We the viewers impose the idea of reality upon it because of photography's capacity for effortless transcription of detail. But just because a photograph is a highly detailed transcription of something that was physically present in front of the camera at the time of the exposure does not mean it is reality. It is a two-dimensional representation of something that existed in four dimensions (height, width, depth, and time). Taking something four dimensional and rendering it two dimensional is no longer reality.

If you photograph something in black-and-white, it is another type of abstraction - nothing exists in pure black and white. Everything has some color tone to it, even the void of space. Transcribing something in black and white reduces it from its reality of color to a representation purely based on relative reflectance. If you photograph something in color, no matter how close and accurate the color is in that representation, it is still only an approximation. We can speak of "good" color and even "excellent" color but "perfect" color is an illusion. There will be nuances lost, subtleties blurred, and inaccuracies transcribed or even superimposed by the process of transcribing the color information.

And reality doesn't have grain - at least not in a literal sense. You can certainly use it metaphorically to say that real life has texture, but real life is not seen or mitigated through a screen of randomly-sized representational dots.

Photographs are in a way a process of stripping away context - you isolate and exclude context by the process of framing and cropping a photograph. But that reality you are photographing ALWAYS has context, both in spatial and chronological dimensions.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Photography is NOT reality - it is a simulacrum of reality, only some of the time. We the viewers impose the idea of reality upon it because of photography's capacity for effortless transcription of detail. But just because a photograph is a highly detailed transcription of something that was physically present in front of the camera at the time of the exposure does not mean it is reality. It is a two-dimensional representation of something that existed in four dimensions (height, width, depth, and time). Taking something four dimensional and rendering it two dimensional is no longer reality.

If you photograph something in black-and-white, it is another type of abstraction - nothing exists in pure black and white. Everything has some color tone to it, even the void of space. Transcribing something in black and white reduces it from its reality of color to a representation purely based on relative reflectance. If you photograph something in color, no matter how close and accurate the color is in that representation, it is still only an approximation. We can speak of "good" color and even "excellent" color but "perfect" color is an illusion. There will be nuances lost, subtleties blurred, and inaccuracies transcribed or even superimposed by the process of transcribing the color information.

And reality doesn't have grain - at least not in a literal sense. You can certainly use it metaphorically to say that real life has texture, but real life is not seen or mitigated through a screen of randomly-sized representational dots.

Photographs are in a way a process of stripping away context - you isolate and exclude context by the process of framing and cropping a photograph. But that reality you are photographing ALWAYS has context, both in spatial and chronological dimensions.

Of course a photo is not the actual thing. It's a depiction. But there are real depictions and false depictions. If I take a portrait of you, its a real depiction whether it's in color or BW . If I clone a mustache on your face, than it's a false depiction. Any judge and jury would know the difference. I don;t understand why photographers can't tell the difference.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Of course a photo is not the actual thing. It's a depiction. But there are real depictions and false depictions. If I take a portrait of you, its a real depiction whether it's in color or BW . If I clone a mustache on your face, than it's a false depiction. Any judge and jury would know the difference. I don;t understand why photographers can't tell the difference.

It's still a depiction, not reality. Just as painting is a depiction. And is the mustache any less false than the black-and-white image without the mustache? I don't exist in black and white. But maybe I do have a mustache, or maybe I did but don't have one now. Re: your comment about judges and juries, well, there's also Justice Stewart's infamous quip about pornography - "I can't define it - I just know it when I see it". There's no objective standard for what is or isn't pornography. To you, it's pornography, to someone else, it's art, to someone else, it's dinner. Which is "real"?

 

[faberryman]

Of course a photo is not the actual thing. It's a depiction. But there are real depictions and false depictions. If I take a portrait of you, its a real depiction whether it's in color or BW . If I clone a mustache on your face, than it's a false depiction. Any judge and jury would know the difference. I don;t understand why photographers can't tell the difference.

There are some extremely skilled Photoshop retouchers who can fool even someone as sophisticated as you.

 

[Dali]

I don;t understand why photographers can't tell the difference.

Because a picture can be realistic, it cannot be reality. I don't understand why some photographers cannot tell the difference.

Back to Magritte's famous quote...