dakel wrote:
On a more important note I slept through my alarm this morning and missed my planned sunrise shoot. Damn.
Heh. Been there, done that. (Though usually when I have a _really_ early alarm set for that I simply can't sleep well and I spend half of the night awake!)
BTW, my list of hypotheticals was not aimed at any post in particular, but more at the general idea that there are clear black and white lines between OK and non OK in photography.
For. me, in the end part of it comes down to a matter of honesty. There are a few aspects to this.
One bright line for me in virtually all cases is that I won't do something in a photograph that I would not cop to if someone asked me about it. There are occasions when I crop out a power line, eliminate a branch, clone out a bright spot leaking through a grove of trees, eliminate a bird doing something distracting (like sticking its wing into the edge of the frame), and so on. It might surprise some of the supposed "purists" that some of my "most natural looking" photographs required a whole lot of post-processing to get that way. (I've also had folks accuse me of doing some kind of inappropriate post-processing on photographs that were barely fine-tuned at all.)
Another has to do with intent. This one can get a bit tricky, and there are two flavors of it.
1. I've enchanted some photographers (I'm thinking of a person who used to operate a large and impressive gallery in a heavily traveled location in a major American city as I write this ) who make a big deal about how their photographs are "pure," often with the clear implication (or outright claim) that this makes them unlike the photographs of other lesser photographers... and they are presenting the subject "just as they found it" with no post-processing... and I can see that this is obviously not the case when I look at their prints. It is the combination of the claim of "purity" with the clear reality that they are making it up that gets to me.
2. What is tricker is when the photographer doesn't make an explicit claim (as in #1 above) but there is what I think of as an "implicit claim" that what we are seeing is the subject as they saw it in the field. In this case, the success of the image depends on the innocence of viewers who don't take the images to represent "the real" and the photographer plays along with and even counts on their misunderstanding. I see this quite a bit with things like some of the Milky Way photographs, and we used to see it with photographs including the moon, but it also happens with amped up landscapes of all sorts.
To be clear, I am not at all averse to the use of post-processing techniques. In fact, I consider them fundamental to producing excellent images, just as I regard editing as being important to writing or expression as important to the performance of musical scores. What I'm very skeptical of are those who make blanket simplistic statements along the lines of "cloning is unethical" and so forth as if it was that simple.
Stepping down from soap box... ;-)
Jan 10, 2026 at 03:47 PM
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