Are Photographer's Obsessed With Sharpness, but blind to the bigger picture?

[erie patsellis]

That should be cast in concrete. I told my students back in the day. "Find your photographic vision by making pictures now. Technique and preferences will come about with experience." Certainly, many chose a technical approach from the beginning. One of such became a good documentary photographer. I believe that in the end very few found the art of photography. I'm not sure I did.

It's ok Jac, in today's post modern aesthetic, art is whatever you say it is..(add air quotes and a bit of a sarcastic chuckle as needed)

Erie

[John Kasaian]

Not to start a war, but digital photographers, on the whole, seem to me to be more obsessed with sharpness than anyone else.
I like sharpness, but my 80-60 year old lenses are as sharp as my old eyes can appreciate, even with the aid of a 9x loupe!
A few rather vocal digital photographers I know stress over how bad they need the latest digital camera or lens because it's sharper than what they are shooting now ( like a 2 year old Nikon or Canon SLR)
These aren't professional photographers, btw, but soccer moms and college students.
it's the Indian, not the arrow, I tell 'em.

[RodinalDuchamp]

Many discussions have been about sharpness of lenses, making sharp macro images, how sharpness is affected by diffraction and on and on and on..

Sharpness is only one aspect of image making yet it appears to be a myopic obsession with more than a few image makers to the degree where the definition of a GOOD photograph is driven by it's sharpness.

Yet, there are SO many other aspects of what makes an expressive image. Composition, tonality, form, color, texture, content-subject and much more.


Bernice

OP - this is one of the reasons I detest digital photography. It seems like if a photo is not surgically sharp it is not a good photo. However in the film world we have such delightful phenomena as soft focus, motion, grain, etc that give a picture soul. I'm not talking landscapes but more so in street photography.

[Toyon]

The story goes that Peter Henry Emerson, the famous landscape photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century, had a painter explain to him why landscape painting was superior to landscape photography. The painter said:

"The photographer may record a scene with one hundred thousand details while the painter faced with the same scene may paint only one hundred details. But the details the painter depicts are the only ones that really matter. All else is rubbish and clutter."

Emerson was apparently shocked by the plausibility of this argument and temporarily lost confidence in his photography. Sharpness is no guarantee of success.

What a lot of ignorant hooey. The painter has the luxury of deciding exactly how each object/feature in a scene will (or will not) be rendered. The photographer's job is much harder, because he or she must use angle of the camera and lens, choice of lens and filter, angle of light, time-of-day, weather and cloud condition and choice of film and paper to achieve the same effect as a painter - the rendering of a coherent impression and expression of a scene.

[Jac@stafford.net]

It's ok Jac, in today's post modern aesthetic, art is whatever you say it is..(add air quotes and a bit of a sarcastic chuckle as needed)

Erie

Aw, Erie, I was marinated in academic art so that unlike my peers I became immune and highly tolerant. Some of them hate me because I got out alive.

Still enjoying the 8x10 you sold me. It is a monster but the best.

[erie patsellis]

Jac, check your pm's..

[Bernice Loui]

The f64 aesthetic has driven most of photography in modern post WW-II times with few exception for more than a few years now. IMO, has been so ingrained into the definition of what acceptable photography is that is has just about flatten numerous other photographic aesthetics that those others have been mostly forgotten. Could this be part of the root of why the obsession with "sharpness" to where the expressive core of images has been run under?

Point being, yes, sharpness is important except what the image has to say as an expression humanity is more important. There comes a time when focusing on using these image making tools as a means to an end of expressive images far out weigh sharpness and those technical aspects of image making.


I'll offer up two images made at Stanford's Anderson museum which recently opened using an iPhone.
Sharp or not, that is not what these images are about.




Another.



Let's discuss more about what is art about and how it related to photography, the human condition and less fighting about stuff like Diffraction and how "sharp" this or that lens might be.


Bernice

On this forum, one could ask with equal validity, "Are photographer's obsessed with softness, but blind to the bigger picture?"

Sharpness is fairly often discussed (I think) because it's easily definable and recognizable, and with the f/64 aesthetic still very popular in lf, a very important element to many people here. I don't think too many are blind to other aspects of photography (composition, form, light, etc.), but sharpness is something that people can easily discuss and resolve problems with. Composition, qualities of light, and other similar aspects are usually discussed only when critiquing an individual image. Not much of this goes on here beyond a few compliments of posted images, I suspect because people are worried about offending each other, and because there isn't as clear a set of standards like line pairs per millimeter. But I agree with Bernice that we should be more aware of such things, and discuss them more often and more deeply. It's our loss...

[David_Senesac]

There are many ways to consider image aesthetics and one ought not apply them in equal weight across the several general genres of photography. And within all genres would be a sub qualification for sharpness that is image display ie print size and viewing audience distance. The OP didn't bother to mention that because it is obvious to a community of photographers though it needs to be acknowledged. Bernice questioned whether "the definition of a GOOD photograph is driven by it's sharpness". To that I would say, of course not if considered narrowly because it dumbs down something which is complex.

Tersely, first a subject ought be aesthetically or informationally worthwhile and then such needs to be captured intelligently using light wisely with technical acceptability with sharpness one facet of technical acceptibility. One can also expect that a printed large life size aesthetic image that is also tact sharp is able to have more impact on audiences versus the same printed image but several times smaller. We humans naturally react more positively to imagery at scales minimally similar to what we actually can see with our eyes.

For any image printed so large that at expected viewing distances the subject frame elements are either obviously fuzzy, grainy, out of focus, or pixelated, the resulting audience opinions could expected to be a negative in the majority of cases. As a landscape and nature photographer one of the most important aspects of a printed image will be that in no important areas of a subject is the sharpness soft at the intended display size. And that has always been a prime objective to overcome for this person carrying a weighty view camera in the field. In this era in which we are all swimming in a vast sea of imagery in media, the majority of created images may look perfectly acceptable as small prints or small media displays like computer screens but would fail miserably if printed at larger scales many of we large format enthusiasts are able to, for a public audience.

And it is exactly this person's quest for image sharpness that given new digital technology has led me into a new world of photography subjects and possibilities. With current high end digital cameras using focus stack blending for static subjects, one can combine a set of image captures to create sharpness and depth of field impossible in the past. I can use my sharpest lenses within sharpest aperture ranges taking several captures of every frame eliminating the limitations of depth of field. And one can also then stitch frames together seemlessly. Thus a recent image I made in a redwood forest was a 3x3 matrix of frames each 4000x6000 pixels with each of the 9 frames a blend of 2 to 4 captures or 27 total captures, focused at different distances.

David

[kintatsu]

For me, it's not about sharpness, it's about focus.

A properly focused image usually contains adequate sharpness and detail. Some may have been made without any emotional content or impact, and may lack any meaningful context. The issue of who a photo should be pleasing to is up to the photographer in question. I believe that the photograph should first appeal the photographer, than to others. It encourages a sense of accomplishment and will show in our sharing.

Ansel Adams said it best when he said "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."

[mdarnton]

I saw an original print of this at the Art Institute of Chicago the other day. It is, of course, a bad photo, because it's not sharp:
http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.co...urf.jpg?w=1012