gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Peter Figen wrote:
For the record, when I posted above, I wasn't talking about images that could be made better in post, I was referring to images in general that really stood the test of time and turn into iconic classics in their genre. Even those need a fair amount of post production, particularly when they're shot on film.
The notion - and I'm not saying it was yours, just using your post as one to reply to - that film didn't require work in post makes no sense at all.
Pictures did not "come out of the camera" on film without intervention. That film had to be developed, and how to develop it involved some choices, at least among those who were trying for something more interesting that drug store prints.
Then the film negatives (or possibly positives) had to be printed. This also involves a range of decision about how to create that print, even in cases where those choices could be made semi-automatically by machines designed to make cheap prints. When the prints was made by a skillful photographer/printer, even more decisions and interventions might be applied - burning and dodging, choices of paper type, contrast, color filters, etc.
The closest that one might come to (almost but not really) out of camera final images was when shooting slides. If you knew/know what you were doing, encountered few or no surprises or tricky situations, never tried anything a bit experimental, you might get a high percentage of technically fine exposures, though "picture perfect" images tend to come in (very!) much smaller numbers.
There is a myth about how great photographers "got it right in the camera" that is responsible for an incredible amount or wrong-headed and misleading notions about photography and how it is done.
On one had we have those who point to greats like Cartier-Bresson who apparently didn't care a ton about some of the technical niceties and who did not make his own prints, but who created many stunningly effective images. A couple of "howevers," though, are in order. First, the "effective" images that we are so familiar with were the best from among many others that mostly never saw the light of day. It was most certainly not the case that every shutter click resulted in an effective photograph - quite to the contrary, actually!
There there is the whole "pre-visualization" notion, which has been twisted and mutated into the mistaken belief that Adams (who often gets credit for the term) knew exactly what his print would look like before making the exposure and, by extension, knew which subjects would or would not produce classics. This is wrong on so many counts as to be laughable. Adams, himself, said (among many notable things he said) that he felt that 12 good photographs per year was a very impressive and satisfactory number. Needless to say, he exposed far more than that. Reportedly, as told to me by someone who knew him, one of his proteges was assigned the task of making contact prints for more or less archival purposes of several thousand of Ansel's negatives. This protege reported that what impressed him most about these photographs, most of which never saw the light of day, was how utterly banal and boring they were - he called them "record" shots.
In reality, photography is (almost always) messy business, full of guesses, hunches, missed opportunities, experiments, back-up shots, and more. "Perfection" has little to do with it, though with hard work and inspired vision and consistent dedication, some excellent work can emerge.
So perhaps "picture perfect" means different things to different people. If it means "fine exposure in non-challenging situations," a careful camera operator can perhaps produce a lot of "perfect" exposures. If it means all that a photograph that might impress us as exceptional can be, then it is a very rare and difficult thing.
Dan
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