where is digital photography going..??

[trog100]

a few years back when i first used a digital camera.. the camera took and produced the pictures.. my computer was simply a quck and convenient means of viewing my digital photographs.. a very quick and convenient sytem..

that and the cheap cost of "digital film" is what sold me on digital photography as opposed to film..

the camera was the photographic tool.. it took the pictures the computer was simply a quick and convenient means of viewing the end results..

over a very few years things have changed.. changed to the point where the camera isnt the main photographic tool any more the computer is.. its ceased to be a simple viewer and become the thing that actually produces the pictures..

the camera is in danger of being relegated to the position of a remote data capturing device for the main photographic tool.. the computer..

somehow i feel the art of photography has been downgraded..

does anybody else feel this way or is it just me.. ???

dont get me wrong i have no desire to go back to film.. but the real reason i shoot jpegs for example as opposed to raw is connected with my feelings that the computor is taking over from the camera as the main photographic tool..

with a jpeg its easier for me to convince myself that its me and the camera doing the job and not me and the computor..

i know i am trying to do the impossible and hold back the flow of time.. but its how i feel.. he he he

trog

[Speed]

I agree with you. The current trend doesn't look good. There are too many folks out there that are mediocre photographers, but computer (read Photoshop) guru's. I do not enjoy spending hours on the computer to "optimize" my images. I want to shoot them, file them, and print (and hopefully sell) the good ones.

With multiple megapizels, RAW capture, and more sophisticated post processing software, it makes it easier for the average photographer to produce great looking work. It can be rather depressing.

Fortunately, there still is the necessity of having proper capture. A blurred image is a blurred image. A badly over or under exposed image will not compete with a properly exposed image. Composition still needs to be good (though cropping can correct some of that - but only to a point). And knowing the basics of photography (form, patterns, point of interest, DOF, etc) still needs to be there as well.

I like to think of the current trend with digital photography as a motivator. My work has to be that much better to stand out. I have to continually push myself to be a better photographer, and to produce work that is of the highest quality. Which, hopefully, is what we are all doing every time we pick up our camera's.

[Erik Stiegler]

I don't really feel that way any more than I felt the darkroom degraded the art of photography back in the day of film.

What's more important, the results or the process?

with a jpeg its easier for me to convince myself that its me and the camera doing the job and not me and the computor.

The bottom line is, whether you use the camera, computer or darkroom as your tools, it you getting the job done, not the tools. Use what works for you, and if that includes computer postprocessing, make the most of it.

[Loupey]

with a jpeg its easier for me to convince myself that its me and the camera doing the job and not me and the computor..

trog

Shooting jpeg is simply allowing a microprocessor to make the adjustments for you - still an "altered" image.

Using film still brings the same philosophical questions. It's just that most people who shot/shoot film tend to think that "processing" by a lab is a "pure" thing. It isn't! How the processor develops the film and makes the print varies considerably, and so, the success of the photographer was not in his/her own hands. Only if one had a fully functional darkroom to control the entire aspect of photography from shutter release to hanging the print would one realize the full scope of variables that one must analyze and decide how best to compensate. So photography has never been just releasing the shutter.

Only now has the power of digital allowed everyone to have a darkroom. This doesn't degrade photography IMO. I personally don't like merged images and heavily editted images. But those tricks were available before to those skilled enough in the darkroom.

Besides, in a few recent Critiques, you offered tips which seem to contradict your concern here. Your words:

"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.."

"denoised and with a clarify plus contrast enhance and darkened slightly it now look okays to print by my standards.. minus the twigs in the top of course..but i still think my slightly tweaked version would look nice hanging on a wall.."

[mwfanelli]

I don't really feel that way any more than I felt the darkroom degraded the art of photography back in the day of film.

What's more important, the results or the process?

The bottom line is, whether you use the camera, computer or darkroom as your tools, it you getting the job done, not the tools. Use what works for you, and if that includes computer postprocessing, make the most of it.

Exactly! Even if the tools change, the final result, the photography, the "writing with light", is what ultimately counts. There are no extra points for doing things the hard way.

[darkman]

the camera was the photographic tool.. it took the pictures the computer was simply a quick and convenient means of viewing the end results..

over a very few years things have changed.. changed to the point where the camera isn't the main photographic tool any more the computer is.. its ceased to be a simple viewer and become the thing that actually produces the pictures..
trog

I sometimes wonder, but in a different sense. I was looking through some recent contests (I'm not a contest fan) and was surprised how many images were obviously edited. I don't mean dodging/burning/curves/saturation/etc or the tin can taken out. I mean significantly altered from the original capture. For instance, many were composites. Not just composites of the same scene, or a moon added in, but of objects that would never be in that scene. Even in the basic categories, e.g. not the "creative" or "altered" type categories. The winner of a landscape category had objects added to the shot that had shadows falling the wrong way, in focus items added to the out of focus foreground, etc.

While the end results are often very cool indeed, should they be considered a photograph? In some ways it doesn't matter, but we as people love to categorize. A painting isn't a charcoal sketch and a water color isn't an oil painting which isn't a mixed media. You can't enter an oil painting into the charcoal drawing category (at least do so and expect to win!). So why are these computer "paintings" (for lack of another name) considered a photograph? Maybe a "compugraph" is a better word?

From my perspective, I'd rather be taking pictures than editing. However, I do edit my photos to suite my taste. Just like I would choose different films.

[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

[trog100]

a current example that springs to mind is the night time shot of the bridge and moon..

someone said two exposure one for the moon and one for the rest and merge them together..

how about an easier post processing alternative.. a library of "moons" all dffirent shapes and sizes just paste one that suits the scene in over the orignal.. ??

me i was happy with the first moon cos i know the limitations of a camera and judged the picture accordingly but its quite clear i am in a minority and the limitations of the camera no longer count..


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.

[another view]

a current example that springs to mind is the night time shot of the bridge and moon..

someone said two exposure one for the moon and one for the rest and merge them together..

This used to happen with film too, but it was done in-camera. Shoot a picture of the moon (works best during the day with a clear sky), cock the shutter without advancing the film and recompose. I admit I did it once just to waste a piece of film. Best (or worst...) results would be to shoot the moon with a long lens, then use a shorter focal length and a warming filter for the other shot (to filter out some of the blue from the sky). It didn't look natural then and it doesn't look natural now - just different tools and more control to put the moon exactly where you want it, as big as you want it, and with the color balance you want.

Getting back to your point about the contests with obviously edited images that were probably more composites than photographs, maybe the judges are to blame for even allowing those images into the contest - unless it specifically allows composites. If that were the case, they should be in a separate category. Bad contest, if you ask me. The images along those lines that I'm thinking of don't look like anything I'd want to spend the time on either, but that's where some people's interest lies.

I'm also in the computer = darkroom camp - it's simply a tool and much easier to use than a traditional wet darkroom. JPEG's shot on factory default settings are similar to auto exposure in the sense that if you got the result you want, luck has as much to do with it as anything. Digital cameras are basically computers with lenses anyway. JPEG's are processed in camera, RAW in computer after the shot has been taken and B&W neg film in the developing and printing steps.

[Medley]

A few observations from one of those "Photoshop gurus" you were speaking of:

1) Yes, I can simulate bokeh. I can fake a fisheye lens, infrared effects, even cross-processing. The list goes on and on, but......

It's all just that- a simulation. Very rarely is it as good as the real thing. As I've said before, the best way to get a fisheye lens effect is to use a fisheye lens.

2) More often than not, I use post-processing to comspensate not for my photographic ability (or lack thereof), but to compensate for the difference between what the human eye sees and what the digital sensor sees. Which one is the "real" image is a philosophical discussion best left to another time.

3) The very fact that I got into photography as a result of my Photoshopping indicates that post-processing can lead to a greater interest in the initial capture rather than the degradation of photography as an art.

-Joe U.

[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).

[trog100]

i think i have simple viewpoint.. once an image is altered to the point it no longer resembles the original image produced by the camera it should no longer be considered a photograph as we know the term..

a piece of art yes.. but not a photograph..altering has always gone on but the ease and power to carry altering to excess is ever increasing..

i think a line does have to be drawn between what is known as digital photography and simply "art"..

trog

[livin4lax09]

WHat tends to add to this debate is the fact that people ASSUME that photoshop is a save all program. WHat any professional photographer will tell you is that if you bring a crappy image into photoshop, it will stay a crappy image. That's that.

Photoshop is not corrupting photography, it is just helping to enhance what you can do with your images. Again, I say...you use digital...you use automatic advance film cameras...you use AF...this is the same thing. you are using advancements in technology to help you with your photography. By shooting digital, you are already post processing, because JPEGs are automatically PPed in camera. by your statements, if you were a TRUE photographer you would be shooting pinhole or something of the sort.

The fact is, many people misinterpret good photography. What they fail to realize is that photography is all about visions, ideas, and a photographic eye. No amount of PS can change a photo taken from the wrong angle, or a shot of an uninteresting subject.

I'll say it again...PS is the second step. You can't GET to the second step if you don't have a first step. If you have no photographic eye or have no vision, you can't make something out of nothing. It's as simple as that. I have plenty of photos I could work on for hours upon hours, even pay to have them photoshopped, and they would still be ****.


moon reference... you can replicate that same effect in the darkroom, and I've done it. I've cloned stuff out in the darkroom... With enough time and dedication (and imagination), many of the effects in PS can be replicated in the darkroom. Doing something to a photo to enhance it to what YOU see is not wrong if the technology is not there to capture it (low dynamic range)

I will never think a photoshopped image is not a photograph anymore.

[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]

I'm just throwing this out there to add to the conversation.

What about the limitations of the camera (digital or film) when it comes to taking a photograph of a very contrasty scene, such as a sunset. The camera can only record 4-5 stops of light before it blocks up the shadows, or blows out the highlights, but the human eye can see about 8 stops of light. So in a scene with a lot of contrast, the camera isn't going to be able to capture everything you see.

There are a couple ways to solve this problem. You could us a split ND filter to ballance the scene. You could take several photos and combine them in PS, or take a single RAW image and process it mutliple times and combine those images. If I did this with the filter, and captured the entire scene as I saw it in camera, does it make it more of a photograph than if I did it with PS? Either way the end result is closer to what I saw in real life, and isn't the end result the most important thing?

[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:

[Skyman]

it all comes back to walter banjamin (the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction) essentially, a photograph has been viewed by many people as being a reality, however Walter Benjamin argues that the photograph is no more reality than a painting is reality. A photograph therefore becomes a representation of a percieved reality. Many people still subconsciously substitute photographs as reality and indeed the newsmedia, gossip mags, advertising and fashion industries would have us believe that these images are reality. most people realise intellectually that a glamour photo is usually highly processed and yet subconciously still accept the image as an accurate representation of how the model would look if they met in person. so i guess the issue is not whether or not post processing of an image detrats from the craft, but rather is the image creator attemting to represent reality or something less easily defined like an emotion or idea. lets look at landscape painters. some paintings attempt to recreate the scene faithfully and others do not. each style of rendering the scene onto canvas is valid in its own right but one should not compare an abstract landscape with the reality and conversely even the most gifted oil painter cannot exactly reproduce the landscape before them. the difference is that psychologically we understand that a painting is a representation however this is often harder for a photograph. Incidentally for those who are familiar with graphic art, it is possible to create completely drawn (on the computer) images that are indtisinguishable from a photograph using applications like corel draw or adobe illustrator. In light of this one can view image production (including drawing, computer art and photography) as another language with which we transmit messages and ideas. as with all languages there is often a gap between what is said, what is meant, what is heard and how it is interpreted. I take my hate off to all image makers who can communicate what they intend to the audience they desire accurately and consistently.

[Ronnoco]

I think you need to either learn to adapt to change or be crushed by it. Improvements in technology make things DIFFERENT but not easier.

There were a lot of doomsayers for the future of photography when there was the move to built-in automatic lightmeters and even worse auto-exposure and auto-focus. It would make it too easy and there would be no longer be a need for the professional. All the art and skill of photography would die.

The reality was that the technology did not produce photographs, the photographer did. Talent, skill, composition, attention to detail and the new ability to understand how the new technology affected photographic quality made a difference between quality work and amateur snapshots.

In video and television it was the same thing. I originally did mechanical and physical video and audio editing, including physically cutting and splicing tape. Electronic and digital editing which I also did was not easier, just different and demanded a new set of different skills.

Digital photography is much like the nature of video in that it means fewer colours but greater contrast and lighting and exposure are crucial. Photographers have discovered that postprocessing is absolutely necessary to get closer to the colours, detail and the quality of the light seen by the eye. The purpose of photography however has never been to duplicate reality but rather to filter it through a human and personal perspective in an often artistic manner.

Computer software just provides new tools to fulfill that purpose. It does not by itself create images and it certainly does not make a mediocre photographer into a great one.
Computer skills are certainly necessary but considerable photographic skills and understanding of light, colour, contrast, luminance, chrominance, composition, lens distortion, etc. are also required. Different skills used on a computer but most are still photographic in nature.

A few here in critique have said that a work looks more like a painting than a photo. It was meant as a criticism but it is actually praise. There is certainly nothing "illegitimate"
about a photographer using his or her artistic perspective to communicate a scene and if he or she did it successfully then praise is warranted. Whether Photoshop or multiple photos or other techniques were used is irrelevant.

Ronnoco

[freygr]

Photo shop and the computer doesn't do anything that a old darkroom expert could not do, just does it faster and with out the smell of stop solution.

The camera and the composure is the thing. Its the old garbage in garbage out, digital just makes it easer to try to make bad photos into a better "bad photo".

[trog100]

i think i am begiining to understand things here a little better..

its an "art" versus technical thing.. once u accept photograhy as "art" the end result becomes the only thing that matters.. the means take second place..

i think i am more interested in the technical side of photography.. the camera/lens combination.. even the image processing firm ware built into my particularly brand of camera.. plus perhaps all the other photographic paraphernalia as well..

i like to use this equipment to its best capabilities.. i get my pleasure not from the simple viewing of the finished result but from knowing how i arrived at it.. i am afraid my desktop computor does not fit into what i think of as photographic equipment.. i do not see it as the modern equivalent of a darkroom..

i perhaps see the imaging technology built into my camera as my darkroom.. but i cant make the leap to seeing my desktop computer as such..

i fully realize that i am limiting my end results as pieces of "art".. but i have never seen my photographs as artwork to be honest simply photographs..

but i now fully understand where the people who see their photogrpaphs as art are coming from.. with art it is only the end result that matters.. the means becomes irrelevant..

to me the means are very important..

trog