gdanmitchell
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gnbuzz wrote:
John's point is so spot on to me. I'm a newbie/wannabe landscape photographer, but also a seasoned journalist, so it confuses and surprises me when people seem so quick to want to clone out elements or alter a scene.
One of the tensions in photography is - no doubt you've heard! - the presumption that it shows us the real.
Not so fast.
Particularly in night photography, the idea that a photograph presents something that was there and does no more is problematic. If you have ever been in a place such as the location of this photograph on a full moon night - and I suspect that quite a few of you have - you know that you do not really "see" anything remotely like this (or like the two recent images by this photographer that include human figures on a playa in full moon light). It is very dark, and portions of the scene would border on being invisible. The stars would not pop out like this, especially on a full moon night.
But a literally "real" photograph (which I presume means one that faithfully reproduces what we would see if we were there) would be nearly black, with only a few points of light, and much of the image in perhaps the lower 10%-20% of the luminosity range.
Is that what we want? I don't think so.
One of the fun things about night photography is that we are photographing things that we cannot see. Instead we are seeing what a camera can see. Clouds and stars blur, moving objects can completely disappear, colors that our eyes do not register in low light do register on the camera, we adjust the luminosity to use the entire range provided by camera/sensor/print. Essentially by definition, night photographs are not real - and this is as it should be.
Regarding the choice about Venus, I don't quite get all of the teeth-gnashing about it. At a different hour on the same night or at a different time of year, Venus would not be there. The light from the planet is a transitory thing in the image, almost the same as if a hiker's flashlight had placed a spot of light in the image or an airplane had flown through a corner of the sky. While I understand that there are some who think that such things should always be left in the frame, their's is a distinctly minority point of view, and few photographers aside from journalists operate that way or have worked that way in the past.
And, am I the only photographer who sometimes envies painters? I was at the David Hockney exhibition in San Francisco this past weekend, which included many of his very large landscapes. (And a lot of other stuff, too.) The power of his paintings seems undeniable, and what they express about his relationship to the landscape is very real. Yet his color palette is anything but realistic in the photographic sense. Are photographers forbidden from using color in similar imaginative ways as they use photographic means to create visual art? (There is the question of the implied realism of photography, and here photographers have to be careful with "truth" in a way that painters do not.)
If photography were to be about nothing more than accurately "capturing" the supposedly objectively real thing in front of our camera, photography would be very nearly worthless as art or as a means of expression. In fact, just about the only value it would have, could it do this and should it aspire to this, would be to provide a thin and unsatisfying substitute for experiencing the real thing for those who cannot be there.
So I say, "Take Venus out if it improves the photograph."
Dan
(And, no, I do not believe that absolutely any form of "manipulation" and so forth is OK in all cases. There are contexts for this, but the subject is likely too big to discuss here.)
Edited on Jan 21, 2014 at 10:42 AM · View previous versions
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