wayne seltzer wrote:
I agree with Samuli that I like landscape shots to look real whether they are from a HDR blend or a single shot that is being post processed. When the lighting ratios between the sky, foreground, background and subject get too out of whack between them then it just looks fake.
IMHO that Charle's last picture doesn't look real like his earlier shots because of foreground rocks looking too bright relative to the sky and other parts of the picture.
Maybe this is just me and pls feel free to disagree.
What I worry about in general is that landscape photography becoming less real in the future and in the quest to make ones picture standout from the rest everyone will be trying to make the scene more incredible than it was by over darkening the sky making the lighting on the subject much brighter than the background/foreground, adding lots of contrast and color. This has already happened in portrait/fashion photography where every shot is airbrushed and retouched all over to make the model look perfect.
When I went to Antarctica three years ago with Michael Reichmann, one of the professional photographers who was instructing was Stephen Johnson. I really respected his philosophy of keeping landscape shots as real as possible. His idea is to document the national landmarks in a truthful way as some of these places may not be the same in the future.
And while I am on the topic of fake, I don't like when people take a moon shot with a tele lens and then photoshop that into a wide angle scene of a large object like Delicate Arch. Also, just saw a wildlife shot in magazine where the guy obviously took a shot of a puffin in flight perfectly focused in the foreground with the background mountain in the distance also in good focus too. Looked to me like he photoshoped the bird right into his landscape scene and then claimed that he just set the camera up and took the picture when the bird flew into the right area. Yeah right.
Now that I got that out, pls. go back to posting your fine ZE shots, sorry for the OT rant.
I didn't really want to respond to your previous post, as you're clearly shooting at me,
but this is just completely, absolutely wrong. Sorry.
The sad part is that some might follow your "advice" and try to avoid "fake" photography.
What you call "real" is not real at all. It is a representation of what today's technology
allows to capture by a digital sensor in a single pass. Has nothing, absolutely nothing
to do with real. The only real thing for us, human beings is what our eyes can see.
The range, ability to distinguish different colors and light levels, ability to create an infinite sharp
depth of field in our brain is unique and doesn't match anything any photograph can show.
We are being offered new tools to attempt to show what we can see - what's wrong with that?
Do you really think that keeping the sky white when it was blue is what will make a scene "real"?
This is unbelievable. Unbelievably wrong to promote this kind of approach.
You keep putting my flower pictures down because they are fake.
Did you go to the Cottonwood Canyon with me yesterday? Did you see what I saw
there what was an amazingly vibrant and intense display of yellows and blues?
We are lucky this year to witness one of the most wonderful wildflower spectacle ever.
I'm trying to show others what I saw. That's all.
I've never had too much respect for M.Reichmann, he is a very average photographer to me
without too much talent. But if he's promoting this approach on his trips, he's just
plain wrong. People don't care about your and his understanding of real.
People are trying to represent what they've seen.
The last part about pasting the Moon etc. is a completely different subject
and shouldn't be mixed up here.
Also what is happening now in fashion and mostly portrait photography has nothing
to do with what's the subject here. It's simply a degradation in pop culture
and the influence of E news in our lives.
Appreciate your comments Andrew. I do believe that photography is fast evolving art form, very very different in just the last 10 years let alone 20. It is personal expression, and I embrace all forms. As in art, there many forms, even though I may not like it, that I do try to appreciate, and see from the artists perspective.
Andrew I have been enjoying your work, and it has a signature, that is yours, and it is your style. It has widened my perspective, to using manual focus lenses again and using the zeiss range of lenses, so thank you for this.
snowboarder wrote:
I didn't really want to respond to your previous post, as you're clearly shooting at me,
but this is just completely, absolutely wrong. Sorry.
The sad part is that some might follow your "advice" and try to avoid "fake" photography.
What you call "real" is not real at all. It is a representation of what today's technology
allows to capture by a digital sensor in a single pass. Has nothing, absolutely nothing
to do with real. The only real thing for us, human beings is what our eyes can see.
The range, ability to distinguish different colors and light levels, ability to create an infinite sharp
depth of field in our brain is unique and doesn't match anything any photograph can show.
We are being offered new tools to attempt to show what we can see - what's wrong with that?
Do you really think that keeping the sky white when it was blue is what will make a scene "real"?
This is unbelievable. Unbelievably wrong to promote this kind of approach.
You keep putting my flower pictures down because they are fake.
Did you go to the Cottonwood Canyon with me yesterday? Did you see what I saw
there what was an amazingly vibrant and intense display of yellows and blues?
We are lucky this year to witness one of the most wonderful wildflower spectacle ever.
I'm trying to show others what I saw. That's all.
I've never had too much respect for M.Reichmann, he is a very average photographer to me
without too much talent. But if he's promoting this approach on his trips, he's just
plain wrong. People don't care about your and his understanding of real.
People are trying to represent what they've seen.
The last part about pasting the Moon etc. is a completely different subject
and shouldn't be mixed up here.
Also what is happening now in fashion and mostly portrait photography has nothing
to do with what's the subject here. It's simply a degradation in pop culture
and the influence of E news in our lives.
With a sensor that has very large full well capacity, you wouldn't have to use several exposures to make a picture look exactly the same as the "unreal" HDR:s of today. It could all be captured with one long exposure.
I'm totally with snowboarder here. There's nothing real with photography at all, so why on earth set up rules for what is supposed to look real, instead of just using your eyes?
It was clearly a continuation of the discussion after I posted my flowers:
wayne seltzer wrote:
Very nice natural coastline shots. I prefer these much more than the over-processed, over-darkened sky,over-use-of-contrast-n-saturation shots of some others which don't look natural at all and are super fake.
but it doesn't matter, I'm just defending what I feel is the big value of today's
photography.
charles.K wrote:
Appreciate your comments Andrew. I do believe that photography is fast evolving art form, very very different in just the last 10 years let alone 20. It is personal expression, and I embrace all forms. As in art, there many forms, even though I may not like it, that I do try to appreciate, and see from the artists perspective.
Andrew I have been enjoying your work, and it has a signature, that is yours, and it is your style. It has widened my perspective, to using manual focus lenses again and using the zeiss range of lenses, so thank you for this.
Charles, thank you for your nice words. You are absolutely right, photography
is changing and improving and let it be that way Yeah, it was different 10 years ago...
It's funny how many of those "real, not fake" old school worshippers raised on film
don't remember that film was not only dull and boring (I mean "real" ),
but often the opposite - completely fake even by their rules. There was many variations
of color profiles, like Agfa this or Fuji that which were unbalanced and biased
towards green or yellow. They looked absolutely awful.
How about Black and White, is it real?
I'm not sure where I can find any existing reference of the "real photography"...
Andrew, neither a painting nor a photography can be real. Not with a 2D medium replicating 3D reality. Not with a paint palette or a sensor replicating our eyesight. Not even close. There, I agree with you totally.
Then, what direction we take our photography is very much a matter of taste and choice.
This is not the territory of "right" or "wrong", of "real" or "fake", but of "like" and "like not".
I happen to enjoy your pics, and that is entirely without justification, nor any need for it that I can think of.
Just my $0.02 worth of rant.
My $0.02 to this topic; it's also about execution, my eye forgives some unreal aspects if they are hidden by good execution otherwise or can be explained based on circumstances visible in the photo.
What Wayne mentioned that foreground rocks are etc. is lighter than background sky. I find it also typically as very big distraction, if it doesn't "fit" to the scene = I will not like the photo. If we take for example snowboarders photo with some rockformation and birds on foreground and very dark&blue&cloudy sky in background. To me it don't look unreal, I assumed the storm was clearing (or building up) in the background and therefore the sky was dark. However if the scene would have been shoot with bright blue sky, but darkened so that the sky blue would be very saturate and as comparison to foreground much dimmer the scene would have looked unreal and that would have distracted me and I would have not liked the photo.
Many people use ND grad filters to achieve this, and 99% of those images I don't like. However there are exceptions, for exampIe I liked very much images photos by thrice using ND grad.
I try to do this "effect" on shooting if possible, since I find artificial methods (ND grad or PP) looking unreal & distracting. The conditions I like to shoot landscapes most are when my foreground subject is just at edge of cloud's shadow (smooth but directional light) and background is in shadow of cloud layer (and if possible some holes in clouds on background to form light beams/lighter patches on ground). In these conditions the effect looks very rarely unreal. Also it seems snowboarder enjoys similar conditions.
What comes to snowboarders Prophoto RGB experiment (very vivid yellow flowers), it looked excellent on my calibrated wide gamut display, but on calibrated "narrow gamut" laptop display (with colorprofile aware browser cabable of showing ProPhoto correctly) it looked pretty wierd.
Very good execution of ugly looking & unrealist HDR (personal opinions - YMMV) can be found for example in this blog: http://www.stuckincustoms.com - I don't know why most of the HDR photos look like this, based on bad compositions and other faults they don't try to be "art" so I have hard time understanding motives why somebody wants to shoot like this.
Enough text more pictures - a little different harbour pictures ZE85 f/4 & f/4.5
And a photo with unreal blue sky (trick done when shooting not in PP - building was metallic very reflective due to which I could underexpose the sky = extra saturated sky) ZE85 f/5.6, very difficult photo to downresize and sharpen due to diagonal lines, had to do it 4 times with different methods before I gave up, since it will always look this awful in this thumbnail size, or I'm just not patient enough in PP...
Of course photography is not 'real', although reality can be one ingredient use to create an image. Photography is an interpreted art through craft. Simply by pointing any camera at any subject, you are immediately interpreting the scene before you. We can go on endlessly about this, but saying that it is reality is never going to be true.
Wayne and Samuli, I fully appreciate and respect your critiques. This is the beauty of respected forums, that we can present pictures and have the full gamut of opinions. I am passionate about photography, and it the ability to evolve and grow into the new areas. ( Evolving into using manual focus lenses again :o) ). This is a great thread, and I personally learning a lot from it, and costing me a mint to Zeiss' benefit.
Re: ovecooked HDR, there is a simple explanation IMHO. When people buy something to produce a certain effect, they need to feel, hear or see the effect. That way, they are reassured that they are getting their money's worth. That means that they will push the processing until the shot screams "HDR! HDR!".
I saw the same effect years ago when subwoofers were introduced in high-end hi-fi. The reason to go to subwoofers is that bass sounds are non directional, so one subwoofer makes no difference over a more converntional bass set-up, and is visually more discreet. Contrary to which, almost every subwoofer owner pushed bass to the point that the sounds screamed "subwoofer!" in a totally unrealistic, but spectacular way.
Sorry, for taking this thread off course and I want to continue discussing this topic on a new thread instead of here. Thanks Charles for being understanding of my opinion and not taking offense. I look forward to open discussion in this new thread.
Everyone, pls. carry on with your great ZE shots!
Image is straight out of camera, no photoshopping... I only took it into photoshop to overlay two images as the composition on one of the images wasn't favorable, but the snake's eye was in perfect focus, so basically the left inch of the screen was an overlay from another image of the snake where there was a miss-focus.
I'm not an expert when it comes to online photos, as 99% of my work is shown in magazines, so I've only ever had to learn how to make the design teams happy with my .tiff files...
No color enhancements were done at all, no sharpening, nothing, it's a standard 5dII color shot. This lens is simply amazing.. Oh and the 100% .tiff is spectacular, way nicer then the websized version I'm showing you tonight.
Here are the real specs, as the exif would be wrong as it only pertains to the left one visual inch of the screen.
100 Makro Planar, ZE
1/13th of a second (I have a trick to handholding)
ISO 1600
f/2
Color mode: Standard (as per 5DII)
Image:
Sorry that it's a makro shot of sorts, I haven't really had a chance to use this lens on an actual assignment, zooms are just easier to bring to work...
adamdewilde wrote:
Image is straight out of camera, no photoshopping... I only took it into photoshop to overlay two images as the composition on one of the images wasn't favorable, but the snake's eye was in perfect focus, so basically the left inch of the screen was an overlay from another image of the snake where there was a miss-focus.
I'm not an expert when it comes to online photos, as 99% of my work is shown in magazines, so I've only ever had to learn how to make the design teams happy with my .tiff files...
No color enhancements were done at all, no sharpening, nothing, it's a standard 5dII color shot. This lens is simply amazing.. Oh and the 100% .tiff is spectacular, way nicer then the websized version I'm showing you tonight.
Here are the real specs, as the exif would be wrong as it only pertains to the left one visual inch of the screen.
100 Makro Planar, ZE
1/13th of a second (I have a trick to handholding)
ISO 1600
f/2
Color mode: Standard (as per 5DII) ...Show more →
),
