where is digital photography going..??

[trog100]

"yes the noise could be considered acceptable.. but noise is easy to get rid of so why not as part of the tweak.. i dont like to see any noise if it can be removed.."

yep i am being corrupted.. he he he

but being serious i am not anti tweaking the odd specal pic.. its large scale alterations i am worried about and large scale alterations being accepted as the norm more than anything..

there is basic rule at work here.. "convenience will always win out".. we have software that does pretty much anything after the the original data has been captured by the camera..

folks who say u cant turn a bad picture into a good one are pretty much kidding themselves.. very often u can..

the art of correctly framing the picture in the first place is being replaced by the art of cropping.. in fact the art of getting anything right in the first place is being replaced by the art (and the ever increasing power) of post processing..

we can have fake bokeh pretty much fake everything with the right software..

i might be anti post processing but that dosnt mean that i am not good at it.. i am all to aware of what can be done after the image leaves the camera.. which of course is what bothers me. he he..

and the old much used darkroom analogy is a poor one.. there is very little comparison between a real darkroom and the power of modern imaging software..

trog

[drg]

If you shoot digitally, you are not using a camera like a film camera. That device you hold in your hands is a computer. It just happens to have applications loaded and a couple of peripherals that allow it to function as a camera.

I have blogged some on one facet of this in "Every Roll of Film Ever Made" (you can find it via my sig below).

Digital is not film, and Film is NOT digital. There have been a lot of comparisons made from the amateurish to very professional and after several years of the digital transition both professionally and personally I have come to believe that it is a disservice to both mediums to compare them.

There had to be a familiarity or similarity between the cameras and nomenclature for successful marketing and therein lies part of the problem.

It has been over a decade that digital has been the Standard for delivery of commercial work. I saw and started using digital film scanning around twenty years ago.

The process is VERY important in several ways. I like and agree with darkman's comments regarding the 'compugraph'. In another blog recently I posed the question, "If it is not printed, is it a photograph if the original is digital?" With film there is a mechanical analog, with digital there is not. That is one reason it is difficult to compare the two. These are old arguments and I am not seeking to rehash them. I shoot almost entirely digital.

The Digital Darkroom dilemma is not an issue. The photographer/graphic designer/picture maker etc., now has more control and responsibility than ever. The number of people involved in the process of producing a final work has shrunk. What it used to take to get a full color printed image has just been simplified and now everyone has access to and knowledge of all the 'tricks' that have been employed for a very long time. I never could airbrush worth a damn, but with a computer I am far more than competent with 'airbrushing'
Yet there is very little in the Digital Darkroom that can't be done mechanically. Gee, where do you think the ideas for all this stuff came from?? Just very few people mastered more than one or two of the techniques.

One thing has changed in many ways. Digital photography biggest addition has been that it allows a degree of Color control that did not exist previously. That was the biggest reason for the move to the virtual world in commercial printing decades back was to get the color right every time. The film was only a beginning. I have friends of nearly thirty years now who have worked in the Movie business behind the camera that still don't understand what the 'color house' and 'editing people' do to make the whole thing look right. Now of course we are seeing 'digitally projected' films.

The discomfort that many photographer's feel is that in a lot of situations they are indeed becoming merely acquisition specialists. Several commercial/corporate photogs I know or am aware of don't even look at 99.99% of their work. They just hand it off, hit the send button, or some other 'mechanism' to deliver it to the graphics people and or art direction group.

Another area that needs serious revisiting is the 'ethics' question that arise from time to time. Most of the standards that cause the most acrimony are based in Journalism and its needs. Those have changed to an unrecognizable extent in the past few years with the influx of entertainment photography whether in the realm of sport or celebrity and the overlapping of both. One example are photos and video being endlessly replayed in Chicago Bears markets of the one player who recently had a friend murdered and is himself charged with a variety of probation and gun violations. They are not flattering images, and are intended to be that way. They are not 'good' photos/videos, they are heavily cropped and digitized to block out certain 'elements' not needed to tell the story.

Twenty years ago there would have been a hue and cry if any of this type of imagery were used. Not by the person being so depicted as much as by the professionals who would have said this is skewed or biased. Now it is the norm.

The main photographic 'tool',if you will, no matter what the medium has been and always will be, light.

[Erik Stiegler]

and the old much used darkroom analogy is a poor one.. there is very little comparison between a real darkroom and the power of modern imaging software..

How is it a poor analogy relative to your original post? You stated your fear that your computer was replacing your camera as your main photographic tool. Photographers have been using their darkrooms as photographic tools since the beginning of photography.

Photography has never been limited to what is done in-camera.

[darkman]

.
Photography has never been limited to what is done in-camera.

I'm arguing semantics, but I disagree. I'd rather say, "Art has never been limited to what is done in camera." I believe once the editing, either in photoshop or a darkroom, ends up very little like the original capture, you've succeeded at creating another form of art. (BTW, I know people who basically do photoshop in the darkroom. They do remove and add elements, as well as change the way objects look, all to suite their needs. )

If someone went into a darkroom with colored lasers and drew a scene on photo paper I wouldn't call it a photograph. Though, some might! Because a collage may be made up of all photos, that doesn't make it a photograph either (IMO).

[drg]

I'm arguing semantics, but I disagree. I'd rather say, "Art has never been limited to what is done in camera." I believe once the editing, either in photoshop or a darkroom, ends up very little like the original capture, you've succeeded at creating another form of art. (BTW, I know people who basically do photoshop in the darkroom. They do remove and add elements, as well as change the way objects look, all to suite their needs. )

If someone went into a darkroom with colored lasers and drew a scene on photo paper I wouldn't call it a photograph. Though, some might! Because a collage may be made up of all photos, that doesn't make it a photograph either (IMO).

There's an issue that if the final work to be a photograph must be very similar to the original capture, we would only have prints of negatives, and oddly colored chrome that had not been fully processed.

So where would you 'place' the photograph?

Is it in the negative/digital file, is it the original scene, is it in only in the mind's eye of the photographer?

It certainly is not in the camera. By camera I am referring to the mechanical element of the lens and aperture and shutter that controls the light.

Is the photograph only in the moment of the light?

By the way, there's been a whole school of photography including Kirlian photography, experiments by Picasso, and work by Man Ray that are about photographs made with nothing more than photo paper and light in the darkroom or a a particular setting. It probably reached it peak with the polaroid film taken out of cartridges and exposed without the benefit of a camera and then 'developed' with a large press or steel rollers to activate a spread the chemistry.

[Loupey]

When I use my wife's digital point-and-shoot, I find the resulting jpegs always too saturated, oversharpened, and generally over processed.

How's that for irony

Turns out my eye+photoshop are still smarter than any camera I have come up against.

[another view]

There's an article in Photo Techniques magazine (think it's the current issue) about a Photoshop technique. It's hard to describe, but you make the dark areas look a little more "haunting", and there's a bit of a shadow around them. Great technique which I want to try out myself. Interestingly enough, the author credits W. Eugene Smith with the initial idea. Apparently he used to blow cigar smoke thru the enlarger's light to get a similar effect...

[mjs1973]

There's an article in Photo Techniques magazine (think it's the current issue) about a Photoshop technique. It's hard to describe, but you make the dark areas look a little more "haunting", and there's a bit of a shadow around them. Great technique which I want to try out myself. Interestingly enough, the author credits W. Eugene Smith with the initial idea. Apparently he used to blow cigar smoke thru the enlarger's light to get a similar effect...

This does sound like a cool trick. I'll have to check it out. When I was in a photo class, the instructor was telling us about some famous photog who use to put drops or water on his paper, then expose his negatives. The water drops would distort the final print. I never did try that, but I bet it would be interesting.

Also, the Orton Imegery Technique was done with film too. It's much easier to do in PS now.

[darkman]

So where would you 'place' the photograph?

It probably reached it peak with the polaroid film taken out of cartridges and exposed without the benefit of a camera and then 'developed' with a large press or steel rollers to activate a spread the chemistry.

I suppose I don't know the answer! It is a big wide gray line. Again, these are just semantics and really have nothing to do with anything but categorization. It's like asking how much of an oil painting has to be done without oil paint before it's not an oil painting? Really, does it matter? For a contest it must surely. Where's the line of how much oil verses another medium? Can I paint one stroke of oil on a water color and call it an oil painting? Sure I can! Just like I can take a bunch of shots and combine bits and pieces from each in PS, use lots of filters and various techniques, and call it a photo instead of digital art. It's what's in my mind, I'm a photographer, not a graphic designer or digital artist, therefore, it's a photograph.

The landscape which I saw win the landscape category of a photo competition I don't believe should have won in this category. Should a life-like drawing of a landscape that was scanned and printed be able to win? Is someone drawing on paper, scanning, and then printing different from someone who took a bunch of photographs of various scenes and digitally used them to make another completely new image (I'm not using photograph here) any different? Neither outcome has a camera and in camera composition involved.

Similarly, just like the good examples you put forth, if someone started with a printed photo and drew or painted on it should it be in the landscape category of a photo competition?

The categorization is definitely not straight forward:mad2: