JWilsonphoto
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 Re: Mustang Air to Air: The Sequel | |
Good Morning Erich,
Knowing you, and the high standard you hold yourself and your final product to, I know that your post holds no malice whatsoever. We see it more and more every day as post processing tools and particularly plug ins flood the marketplace. Certainly evaluation of the end product is ultimately up to the creator and the marketplace, but the lines between photography and "rendering have not just been obscured, but obliterated. Maybe we are just "old school" creatives who value the hard won and effective techniques we've developed over the decades, but I believe it's more than that. Don't get me wrong, I love the flexibility and creative edge that digital technologies have brought to our craft, but I still shoot as if there was a 36 exposure roll of Kodachrome, or a 4x5 sheet of Fuji Velvia 50 in the camera. The fact that I have four or more stops of dynamic range now doesn't, in my mind, give me license to expose sloppily, it just presents an opportunity to save an image if I goof up. Once again, completely up to the artist, but the fact that a sky and ten other elements that didn't exist in the same time/space continuum, can be tossed into a composition because of available technology, doesn't, in my mind give me a pass on developing hard won creative techniques over decades. Right or wrong, and it's most likely neither, I can say that I have never dropped a sky into an image, I've considered it, but something just tugs on my ego, pride, old school photographic ethic, that won't allow it. I'll go back and re-shoot it as many times as it takes, but I can't seem to cross the boundary even though I created both images.
Personally, and it is very personal for each of us, I love being able to fix a broken window in an architectural image, clone out a sign, get rid of an oil spot on a ramp, or a bug that has met it's fate on a white radome, but much more than that and I feel like it's a rendering. The architectural world is filled with photographers who beat HDR to death, create ridiculous (my opinion) scenes outside windows that would make Thomas Kinkade nauseous. There are clients who are all over that technique, not many, and none of mine. Can I replicate that look, easily, much more easily than the techniques I use in fact, but I won't. I guess each of us have our "vision" and that has a profound influence on our end product, our rates, and ultimately our client list.
I guess, in the immortal words of "Curly", for each of us, "it's that one thing.............", for me, and this is no secret to any of you here, it's getting it right in the camera.
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