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 p.2 #7 · Blended landscape images - legitimate or not. | |
David Baldwin wrote:
I am seeing more and more "night" photos made up of composite exposures...
As I wrote earlier, I have some sympathy with your concerns, but also some concerns about your concerns! ;-)
When it comes to night photography, things are even murkier. No night photography looks real! Virtually all night photography turns the nigh environment - which is normally quite close to black - into a place full of interesting light, stars that leave trails through the sky (they don't in real life), requires light painting, and generally shows the night world in ways that barely reflect what it really looks like.
And that is fine. It is even sort of the point of night photography.
Camperjim wrote:
To me it seems very evident, that lots of very impressive landscape images have been heavily manipulated.
Indeed. And it has always been so. Sometime you may be fortunate enough to see John Sexton illustrate what Ansel Adams did to his original capture in order to produce the "clearing storm" photograph. I suppose that if one is prepared to write off that work as being illegitimate due to manipulation in post, then we can write off an awful lot of photography, some of which might surprise people just as much.
There is this odd myth of the unmanipulated photographic masterpiece, and it is a myth that seems to stubbornly stick around despite all of the evidence to the contrary. So-called manipulation of images after capture in the camera is not the issue at all. There have been darned few photographers who believed that the post-processing phase (then called developing and printing) was any less important or creative than the phase during which the shutter was opened and light collected.
And even during that "capture" phase photographers have always done many, many things to intentionally produce an image that was not a supposed reflection of the real. They use tilts/shifts/rise/fall. They select various focal lengths. They add filters to adjust the tonal relationships. They compose to include or leave things out. They might pick up something or move it before making the exposure. They might use fill flash. And on and on and on and on...
There really is no issue with post processing and no photograph is an accurate "capture" of actual reality - as I like to say, "All photographs lie."
The real discussion is a much richer and more complex one about context and intent and how an image is perceived by viewers, and is very little at all about which techniques might be "right" or "wrong" in and of themselves.
Sneakyracer wrote:
All of the images I sell and have on my site are made from a single RAW file. I also do quite a bit of post-processing in regards to color and tonality but the source is always a single file. That is the way I like to work. I only use multiple files for some panoramas but only to stitch the files to create a wider angle of view.
Now we are really trying to parse out techniques in bizarre and hopeless ways. I'm not sure that you meant this, but the idea that:
- images assembled from multiple exposures are great if the composite is used to make a wider image than the camera can capture, but
- we might have some issues if multiple exposures are combined to handle a wider dynamic range than the camera can capture, but
- although we might object to the use of focus blending to create extreme DOF, we kind of like the result, but
- multiple exposures of different lengths are wrong...
leaves us with a gigantic mess that we cannot possibly sort out on the basis of what technique was used.
Phrasikleia wrote:
I've often wondered why film (i.e. cinema) does not seem to share this burden.
That is an interesting and complex question. The short answer is that it does share the same burden or reference to the supposed real. In fact, we "believe" things that we see in movies in a sense, even when we know logically that they are impossible. Twelve-foot tall blue people do not swing through the forest canopy and - sorry to disillusion you - Star Wars is not real. ;-)
We are more ready to engage in "suspension of disbelief" with moving media. (We do the same with opera.)
Of course, film also incorporates the realm of animation, which is (or was) drawn, making the analogy even more complicated.
Camperjim wrote:
I think we would all agree that there is nothing worse than a bad post processing attempt. But being there to find special moments and conditions does not mean that post processing is unnecessary. Many of the best images seem to start with a great capture (or more than one capture) and also include great PP which might include a lot of enhancements. Often the spectacular resulting image is a long way from reality.
That goes without saying! The "reality" - or what passes for it for most of us - of the actual experience of being there is far more rich and complex than what a photograph can contain. That "real" experience includes the warmth of sun or the cold of winter, perhaps wind, the smells of the vegetation or of wet/dry earth, our own feelings of exhaustion and perhaps stress and getting into such a place, recall of who was there with us or of what it was like to be there along, things that are not within the field of view of the camera's lens, and much more.
A photograph can never replicate that range of experiences. It can suggest to us memories of such things or imaginations of them, but these are in the minds of the observers and not the reality of the scene being photographed.
Photographs have a very tricky and complex relationship to "reality" and the actual nature of the things that are purportedly the subjects of photographs. By their nature they are tremendously subjective things. We often imagine that the photographs tell us much more truth about those things than they really tell us. In fact, we imagine much of what we respond to in photographs and we fill in many, many empty spaces with our own thoughts are response to the photographs. In the end, photographs may tell us more about the people who make them and more about ourselves than they tell us about the stuff in the frame.
Dan
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Archive 2013 · Blended landscape images - legitimate or not.
