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11/03/2006 06:52:29 AM · #126 |
My initial reaction to this thread was that I was not really bothered too much by the idea of an additional fish (a relatively minor element of the image) being cloned into the photograph. I was actually bothered more by the very lengthy response from Mr. Petersen. Most of his argument seems totally unrelated to the issue.
He seems to argue, for example, that:
(1)cropping is basically inappropriate and
(2) the choice by a photographer of how to frame a shot (the example of including a girl's face without including the surrounding environment)is no different that adding elements in PS after the fact.
Even though, as I mentioned, I didn't have a major problem with the cloning itself, I think Mr. Peterson would have been better served just by a simple admission that the fish was cloned and why, instead of throwing up what seems to be a smokescreen, in my opinion. |
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11/03/2006 08:10:17 AM · #127 |
Originally posted by digitaldave:
...I think Mr. Peterson would have been better served just by a simple admission that the fish was cloned and why, instead of throwing up what seems to be a smokescreen, in my opinion. |
And we all have our opinions, don't we? :)
Message edited by author 2006-11-03 08:10:42. |
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11/03/2006 08:52:22 AM · #128 |
Originally posted by glad2badad:
Has anyone mentioned 'Integrity'?
I've read various points here about the Bear/Fish photo being outside of DPC rules. Fine, I agree.
I've read where some have mentioned the book was about exposure and the photo manipulation (cloning) is irrelevant in the scope of the book. Ok, fine, the book is about exposure.
Paintings vs a Photograph? That's a bit thin (nothing personal Terry) - two different items. One expects a painting to be approximate in most cases, artwork with liberal artistic license.
Photography can be many things. If I'm looking at a photo that is a studio or setup shot I know that subjects and items in the composition have been placed/manipulated. My expectations are that it's unrealistic, something may be added and/or removed via PP. If I'm looking at a photo on the front page of the newspaper I expect it to be a true representation of the actual scene.
Point I'm trying to make in a long-winded manner, is that there are various expectations many viewers have when looking at any particular photograph. One of the expectations that I believe exists is that photography of nature is a representation of the actual scene for the most part. Ok, add some contrast, convert to B/W, etc...but don't add elements that weren't there to begin with after the fact.
Integrity is a word I associate with nature photography. |
This is mostly a long list of your particular constraints and limitations that you place on your own photography. Nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing inherently 'right' in them either.
Landscape and nature photographers have always distorted, manipulated and misrepesented the truth. Its always been weird to me that people are surprised by that. Art Wolfe clones animals into his shots to complete the patterns he was pre-visualising. David Muench uses camera movements to artificially enlarge foreground elements. Many digital landscape photographers recreate that large format technique by using the selection and transform tools. Ansel Adams turned an entirely white sky to dark in his most famous work (Ever think that in moonrise over Hernandez, if the sky is so dark that it looks like night - why is the sun shining behind the photographer ? The original exposure has a much more normal bright, light sky - burned to completely black in the print)
Photos lie. We might hold photojournalists to a higher standard. But not landscape photographers - other than in the weird world of camera clubs and online contests.
There is no truth in photography. Once you get over that myth the world becomes a much less indignant place to live in ;) |
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11/03/2006 08:54:31 AM · #129 |
Originally posted by Keith Maniac:
As I said before, every time a photographer takes a picture, s/he essentially "crops out" everything that s/he chooses to not include in the viewfinder. What difference does it make whether you make this cropping decision "in camera" or in post-processing? |
Because you can't sell it if you crop after the fact. Like Bryan said, he's a commercial photographer. He needs to sell his images. Try cropping out 50% of an image and then uploading it to a site like Alamy. You won't get very far. |
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11/03/2006 09:06:51 AM · #130 |
Originally posted by Gordon:
... Photos lie. We might hold photojournalists to a higher standard. But not landscape photographers - other than in the weird world of camera clubs and online contests.
There is no truth in photography. Once you get over that myth the world becomes a much less indignant place to live in ;) |
Interesting read. Thanks for the response.
I guess there has always been an element of "bending the truth" in photography, but I didn't think that it applied to all venues. :(
BTW, when I say "Nature" I'm leaning more towards wildlife (animals, insects, etc...) rather than landscapes. Guess I belong to the old-fashioned purists club in thinking that wildlife photography should present accurate representation of the scene as it unfolded in front of the photographer. Perhaps I should read some newer books on wildlife photography and see what's changed in the last 10 years or so (I can understand changes in technique with equipment updates, but not integrity).
Reminds me a bit of the row that started over the Wildlife challenge and Zoo entries. :D
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11/03/2006 09:13:02 AM · #131 |
Originally posted by Gordon:
Originally posted by Keith Maniac:
As I said before, every time a photographer takes a picture, s/he essentially "crops out" everything that s/he chooses to not include in the viewfinder. What difference does it make whether you make this cropping decision "in camera" or in post-processing? |
Because you can't sell it if you crop after the fact. Like Bryan said, he's a commercial photographer. He needs to sell his images. Try cropping out 50% of an image and then uploading it to a site like Alamy. You won't get very far. |
From reading Mr. Peterson's response, I did not get the impression that his anti-cropping views had anything to do with the ability to sell his work. I got the impression that he thinks there is something wrong with it in principle. He refers to himself as a "purist" when it comes to cropping.
He writes: "It is no secret that in every course I teach at my on-line photography school (www,ppsop.com) I have little room for excuses as to why a student didn’t get the crop right in-camera! It is in this one area, photographic composition, where I take a really firm stand and I welcome any and all challenges: I do ALL of my cropping in-camera 99.9% of the time! In this arena I am the first to call myself a purist!" (italics added by me)
Or am I reading too much into his response? |
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11/03/2006 09:32:01 AM · #132 |
Great thread - I've only just found it.
I think I would probably be in the purist camp - in so far as I think the dichotomy is real
but because of the historical development of photography it seems to me that the purists are seen, or see themselves, as defenders of 'real photography' while the phonies see themselves, or are seen, as using special techniques to enhance their work.
I think this may be an error. just because purism came first does not make it real and the other deviant. I usually vote high for photographs that look relatively unprocessed. this is because I lke them. I don't regard them as holding more truth particulalry, but they do rersonate with me more in an emotional sense.
perhaps it is the pursists who should be regarded as the users of specialist rules and techiques - we are the ones erecting boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable after all.
Using this logic 'basic editing' would mean - do anything you like. Adnaced editing would mean that only certain tools would be admissable. And the pruist stran ofphotography would be given due recognition as a small, very specialist part of what photography is today. (But still the one I personally prefer.)
Hope this makes sense.
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11/03/2006 09:33:58 AM · #133 |
Originally posted by yann:
Take this photograph by Joey Lawrence for example. 
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How do you know this photo did not have major elements
cloned into it?
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11/03/2006 09:37:34 AM · #134 |
Originally posted by ClubJuggle:
What if Mr. Peterson had produced a painting instead of a photograph? If he had seen only two fish, but painted three in a "realistic" landscape painting, would we care?
~Terry |
I'd have to take a look at the "raw" image to know that.
hehehehehehe
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11/03/2006 09:42:04 AM · #135 |
| ...you just need to see a salmon run in real life to know it pretty much looks exactly like Bryan Peterson's original picture. All the fish look the same and there's hundred in the same spot and they're all jumping in the same direction. Pretty neat actually. |
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11/03/2006 09:43:27 AM · #136 |
Originally posted by Keith Maniac:
Originally posted by Gordon:
Originally posted by Keith Maniac:
As I said before, every time a photographer takes a picture, s/he essentially "crops out" everything that s/he chooses to not include in the viewfinder. What difference does it make whether you make this cropping decision "in camera" or in post-processing? |
Because you can't sell it if you crop after the fact. Like Bryan said, he's a commercial photographer. He needs to sell his images. Try cropping out 50% of an image and then uploading it to a site like Alamy. You won't get very far. |
From reading Mr. Peterson's response, I did not get the impression that his anti-cropping views had anything to do with the ability to sell his work. I got the impression that he thinks there is something wrong with it in principle. He refers to himself as a "purist" when it comes to cropping.
He writes: "It is no secret that in every course I teach at my on-line photography school (www,ppsop.com) I have little room for excuses as to why a student didn’t get the crop right in-camera! It is in this one area, photographic composition, where I take a really firm stand and I welcome any and all challenges: I do ALL of my cropping in-camera 99.9% of the time! In this arena I am the first to call myself a purist!" (italics added by me)
Or am I reading too much into his response? |
I only know that I've done a couple of his classes and had this very discussion with him over a couple of weeks. The main reason was resale value. It also happens to be a good discipline to get in to, encourages you to fill your frame, get in close and helps to take good pictures, but his main thrust was that you can't sell it if you have to crop it (particularly if you were selling slides) It is maybe easier to crop but harder to sell these days with digital - because of the drop in resolution associated with it.
Works fine for online usage and contests like DPC, but not for stock or print sales.
Robert Capa was another great believer in not cropping. |
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11/03/2006 09:46:12 AM · #137 |
Originally posted by thelobster:
Great thread - I've only just found it.
I think I would probably be in the purist camp - in so far as I think the dichotomy is real
but because of the historical development of photography it seems to me that the purists are seen, or see themselves, as defenders of 'real photography' while the phonies see themselves, or are seen, as using special techniques to enhance their work.
I think this may be an error. just because purism came first does not make it real and the other deviant. I usually vote high for photographs that look relatively unprocessed. this is because I lke them. I don't regard them as holding more truth particulalry, but they do rersonate with me more in an emotional sense.
perhaps it is the pursists who should be regarded as the users of specialist rules and techiques - we are the ones erecting boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable after all.
Using this logic 'basic editing' would mean - do anything you like. Adnaced editing would mean that only certain tools would be admissable. And the pruist stran ofphotography would be given due recognition as a small, very specialist part of what photography is today. (But still the one I personally prefer.)
Hope this makes sense. |
Purism didn't come first. The whole initial thrust of photography was trying to recreate painting effects. Pictoralists et al. It's gone back and forth between purists and fakers ever since. But the purists all lie in different ways, too.
That's why I find these sorts of threads weird. They fly in the face of almost all the history of photography. Somewhere the non-camera using public got into their head that the 'camera never lies' but pretty much all photographers know that the 'camera always lies'
Not sure where that got switched around though. |
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11/03/2006 09:49:12 AM · #138 |
| Point taken - i didn't mean to claim to be an expert on the history of photography - just that 'old school' people tend to mbe purist and vice versa. |
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11/03/2006 09:49:37 AM · #139 |
Originally posted by Gordon:
Not sure where that got switched around though. |
Maybe it happened about the same time as "I could care less" came to mean disinterest ... |
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11/03/2006 10:41:49 AM · #140 |
Originally posted by thelobster:
Point taken - i didn't mean to claim to be an expert on the history of photography - just that 'old school' people tend to mbe purist and vice versa. |
I guess I don't see that. There's a long history of people faking, adjusting, modifying, moving, cloning and generally changing around the truth in their photographs.
Landscape photographers are some of the worst - always focusing on the 'beauty' and avoiding taking pictures of the reality.
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11/03/2006 10:53:57 AM · #141 |
Originally posted by Gordon:
... Landscape photographers are some of the worst - always focusing on the 'beauty' and avoiding taking pictures of the reality. |
Hmmm. I sense a veering of the subject here. A photo either shows what was there as is (no cloning in/out) or it doesn't. Now what you seem to be implying is the subject choice doesn't tell the truth. What a photographer chooses to take a photo of has nothing to do with the truth within the image - but I can see where you may be leading with a principle type issue. For example, a wonderful landscape shot of a flowing river with colorful fall foliage, etc...could be a photograph of the landfill site the photographer is standing on instead if the camera was pointed in a different direction.
Different subject matter entirely IMO.
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11/03/2006 11:58:15 AM · #142 |
Hey Keith, I knew when you started talking about "crops" that there was a photo of yours that would apply here. I just found it.
Obviously you weren't trying to "lie" about what you captured here as your title explains it but I find it funny that some people didn't believe you. I guess sometimes it's hard to actually show the "truth" in a photo. :P
Message edited by author 2006-11-03 11:58:50. |
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11/03/2006 12:12:34 PM · #143 |
Originally posted by glad2badad:
Originally posted by Gordon:
... Landscape photographers are some of the worst - always focusing on the 'beauty' and avoiding taking pictures of the reality. |
Hmmm. I sense a veering of the subject here. A photo either shows what was there as is (no cloning in/out) or it doesn't. Now what you seem to be implying is the subject choice doesn't tell the truth. What a photographer chooses to take a photo of has nothing to do with the truth within the image - but I can see where you may be leading with a principle type issue. For example, a wonderful landscape shot of a flowing river with colorful fall foliage, etc...could be a photograph of the landfill site the photographer is standing on instead if the camera was pointed in a different direction.
Different subject matter entirely IMO. |
it's exactly the same topic as this thread has been about. Truth in photography is a lie. If it is added before shutter, or removed by composition, or omission. The vast majority of landscape photographers drive through the landfills, past the strip malls and out to the 'pristine' wilderness. Then hike away from the car parks and man-made boardwalks to find their shot. Then compose the shot to avoid the litter at their feet, or the other junk that shows the people that were there before them. Camera angle might be changed to avoid the scar of a footpath leading up the mountain and with some care and luck, the smog hanging in the air won't be noticeable from the city miles away.
Where's the 'truth' in that ? We add and subtract things to our pictures all of the time, by how we point a camera or wave a brush. This artificial sanctity of the image is just an affection peculiar to some photographers and viewers.
I only really have an issue with it in cases where images are purporting to be 'truth' i.e, that sub section that falls into the journalistic category. Though even there bias is obvious and expected. There is a cultural discussion to have where it mostly seems to be the US has this notion that the press is supposed to be 'unbiased'. I'm told it is in part due to the collapse of the two local newspapers per town that used to exist and general shift towards huge publishing houses.
Most of the papers in Britain for example don't even bother to pretend not to be biased one way or another. In many ways I find it naive to even expect this lack of bias would exist, in written or pictorial reporting. As I started out with in this post - what you do or don't show in your pictures is just as much an editorial decision as what you clone in and out.
Not that I don't see the educational value of placing constraints on your photography. Striving to get the best possible image, in camera, is a great skill to practice. It is certainly better to get it right first than have to fix it up later in photoshop.
Same way it is a great discipline to get it right in camera and don't expect to crop it later. All of these things are virtuous aims for a photographer. But they don't impart some higher 'truth' to the image. They just make you a better photographer. More efficient. More engaged with your subject. That's why the DPC basic rules are good too. They place constraints on you and make you grow and be more creative. Educationally they are great.
But they don't impart some greater truth or virtue to an image, than if you throw them away and clone things where you want it or distort reality to fit your vision like every photographer has done, before. Don't make the mistake of constraining your creativity all of the time, to some randomly selected set of 'rules' or truths.
Message edited by author 2006-11-03 13:30:33.
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11/03/2006 12:16:30 PM · #144 |
Originally posted by yanko:
Hey Keith, I knew when you started talking about "crops" that there was a photo of yours that would apply here. I just found it.
Obviously you weren't trying to "lie" about what you captured here as your title explains it but I find it funny that some people didn't believe you. I guess sometimes it's hard to actually show the "truth" in a photo. :P |
Or, more to the point, no matter how "truthful" the components of the image are, their particular juxtaposition creates a "lie". Like one of those pictures where one kid is holding another in the palm of her hand. You can't even SEE that "naturally"; you have to close one eye to "see" it.
R. |
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11/03/2006 12:37:35 PM · #145 |
Have overlayed images at SS and as stereo pairs. The fish - and some water – are 100% cloned. If that helps anyone then great! Only took 2 mins but it bugged me that there was any dispute.
; j |
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11/03/2006 01:10:13 PM · #146 |
Originally posted by ClubJuggle:
Originally posted by Gordon:
and when you realise that it is you that makes the boundaries, you can start to really go somewhere interesting... |
Very well said. Mind if I use that in my signature?
~Terry |
if you like
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11/03/2006 01:18:32 PM · #147 |
Wow. OK! I can see my boots aren't tall enough for this thread anymore as it's getting really, really deep. :D
It's been fun - carry on.
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11/03/2006 01:43:15 PM · #148 |
Originally posted by fir3bird:
Originally posted by yann:
Take this photograph by Joey Lawrence for example.
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How do you know this photo did not have major elements
cloned into it? |
Well, if you read Joey's comments on that photograph, he doesn't say anything about major elements beeing cloned in, so I assume there was none. If there is cloning, then, like I said, this photograph loses alot of points in my book. This is a 10 because it's beautiful and hard to capture. If he cloned in elements, then it's just beautiful and not so hard to capture so therefor it loses points. It's still a great image, but it's not worth as much anymore as a photo.
Btw, I don't have anything against cloning major elements into photographs... I have problem with not mentioning it (or even worst, talking about how cool it is that you got to capture these elements when in fact you didn't.)
I also think that cropping before or after doesn't make a big difference. If you don't have to crop after, then more credits to you because it means you got it right on the spot. But if you have to crop after, no big deal. Once you've cropped, the part you're left with is still the exact representation of what was there, it's not like you change the reality or anything.
If you have to clone in or out key elements of a photograph, ok, but at least mention it so that ppl don't feel like you tried to fool them when they learn that you hacked the photo.
That's my 2 cents.
Message edited by author 2006-11-03 13:47:06. |
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11/03/2006 01:54:18 PM · #149 |
Originally posted by yann:
If you have to clone in or out key elements of a photograph, ok, but at least mention it so that ppl don't feel like you tried to fool them when they learn that you hacked the photo. |
I'm going to guess that if Mr. Peterson had been writing a book on composition he would have mentioned the extra fish ... |
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11/03/2006 04:21:48 PM · #150 |
| Very interesting thread, indeed! I'm fairly surprised that he didn't take the time to attend to the tiny details that triggered this discussion. You'd think that it wouldn't have been very hard to simply clone the water droplets a little differently, or tweak the positioning of the eye of one of the fish, etc., to make the cloning virtually undetectable. It almost makes me wonder if he intended to get "caught." |
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