True. I'm just one of the folks without coin who peeps throgh the gallery's window when nobody's looking...
But I haven't seen the deliberately-obviously-heavily photoshopped photo-illustrations in a fine art gallery yet. I do still see a lot of analog and "straight" digital work there. But then, I'm usually a bit behind the times on such things...
"I love my Verito lens, but I always have to sharpen everything in Photoshop..."
Or a cave to the modern house... I don't see why not, both still serve the same purpose, only with a different level of advancement and complexity.
After all, photography is the act of capturing light projected through a lens onto a light-sensitive material for a brief moment of time. Everything else is just supporting technology. If anything, I would certainly hope this technology does change with the times!
The original photo retouchers, to create seamless work, endured long apprenticeships and used specialized tools and chemicals. Nevertheless their ability to change images was quite limited, unless it was designed to look intentional (e.g. Uelsmann). In photoshop wholesale alterations can be made in nanoseconds, leaving virtually none of the original structure of the image. Yes, both techniques alter original materials, but the scale and scope and effort involved in making the changes are so vastly disproportionate that the analogy is very weak.
people have been altering photographs since they were able to take them.
masking, double printing, retouching, swapping heads, heavy handed manipulations,
digital technology just allows a different set of tools to do the same thing.
i don't really see much of a difference ...
HDR stinks. I see another one made with a $13,000 Hassy or otherwise, I am going to barf on my desk. Shimmering skies and a sparkling ground should be saved for a glittery My Space page, and not photography. I guess I'm too old school now having learned color photography via RA-4 without the HDR.
Some have asked, where is the line? For me, when non-photographic manipulations are made, they are either correcting a flaw in the photographic process, or producing something new to look at. When that something new is the point of the presentation, then it has crossed into photo illustration.
My definition of a photograph is simple: An image produced by projecting light onto a sensitized surface.
Many Photoshop techniques are purely photographic, even though they are executed digitally. Making something lighter or darker, or systematically changing the coloration, various algorithms used to combine photographic data within the image, or even cutting and pasting seem to me photographic. Grabbing the pen tool and drawing, or painting a selection area with a color selected from a palette--those are not photographic because they are not working from data resulting from light projected onto a sensitized surface.
But all that is just a matter of technique. I suspect the real issue is art.
I see a lot of current photographs as being quite faddish, despite the apparent religious worship of innovation rather than, say, beauty. Style is timeless, but fads are ephemeral. Many scoff at the style of Adams, or Strand, or Stieglitz, and in most cases their scoffing seems to stem from their worship of innovation, which consigns the work of past masters to the dustbin of cliche. History has a way of sorting that out in the long run. Many who think that past masters are cliche will be forgotten when those masters are still studied and appreciated. This is true in all art forms. Everyone is always looking for innovation as a means of defining their own voice or vision, and confuse fad with style.
The notion of realism in photography has always been a myth. I made a color photograph of a grave marker on a church on the high road between Santa Fe and Taos (maybe it was Chimayo--but I forget now). Later, I discovered that Adams had photographed the same marker half a century before, and that image was published in Photographs of the Southwest. In my color image, the wrought iron grave marker with wood inserts was dark--in the Zone II to III range. The sky was a brilliant, bright blue. In his image, he's used a red filter and the sky was very dark. The grave marker was bright with Zone IX highlights of the sun reflecting off the surface of the wood and wrought iron. My image, which was more realistic, had the opposite tonal values that his did. Yet both were purely photographic and superficially realistic.
Rick "adding a few random comments" Denney
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