Modern Photography and Ancient Art

[KevinKohler]

None of what you did is new. It's been being done for over a century. It's just a lot easier now.


Is using an electric drill as opposed to a hand drill cheating?

 

[KevinKohler]

Oh, and you also pumped up the saturation a tad.

 

[Tanngrisnir]

Adams is noted for his statment, "the art is in the darkroom"

Aye, that. This .gif from an Adams piece ought to clear up any doubt the 'purists' have about him using the darkroom as the Photoshop/Lightroom/DxO/Capture One of his day.

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/bl...el-blue-10/images/anseladams_moonrise4251.gif

 

[Tanngrisnir]

Yes Photoshop is cheating. That is the point of this post. But you are still not getting that I have no more advantage than anyone else who shoots straight .jpg images from a smart phone or a DSLR. I use Photoshop to make my jpg images look better. I rarely shoot RAW.
Here is an example. These are three .jpg images I shot on a tripod the original shot, a second shot one stop higher than the original, and a third shot one stop lower than the original.
Hope this helps

Except that, of course, there is no 'cheating' in photography. Even if you were to shoot only straight .jpg, you've made the decision to allow the camera to digitally process the shot for you.

 

[kanabco]

As a wedding photographer, averaging about 500 images per wedding, that becomes invaluable.

I'll wager the 500 images are not RAW files.

 

[KevinKohler]

I'll wager the 500 images are not RAW files.

Course not. I set my color balance profile in camera, based on where I'm shooting, and then shoot .jpg. RAW files are for shots that I fully intend to muck around with in post production.

 

[kanabco]

Except that, of course, there is no 'cheating' in photography. Even if you were to shoot only straight .jpg, you've made the decision to allow the camera to digitally process the shot for you.

But then if you put the ".jpg" it in Photoshop and increase the saturation slightly, is that cheating?. I'm ok if you say it is and ok if you say it isn't

 

[KevinKohler]

But then if you put the ".jpg" it in Photoshop and increase the saturation slightly, is that cheating?. I'm ok if you say it is and ok if you say it isn't

No more cheating than shooting color chrome, reducing the aperture and increasing the exposure Time to increase saturation.

I did it all the time, main reason why shooters used to refer to sun up and sun down as the magic hours. Less light means slower shutter speed. Slower shutter speed means higher color saturation. It's why night time photos are so rich, because those are exposures of several seconds to a minute.

 

[Tanngrisnir]

But then if you put the ".jpg" it in Photoshop and increase the saturation slightly, is that cheating?. I'm ok if you say it is and ok if you say it isn't

No, it's not cheating. Again, in photography, there is no cheating. Full stop.

 

[kanabco]

None of what you did is new. It's been being done for over a century. It's just a lot easier now.


Is using an electric drill as opposed to a hand drill cheating?

To me it does not matter.

 

[KevinKohler]

To me it does not matter.

Then get rid of your camera, and make a pinhole camera. I mean, from where photography started (as a tool for painters to project images onto their canvas), having a means of winding the film roll is cheating. Used to be, there were no adjustable shutters, just metal cards which shooters put carrying sized holes into, and had to be swapped out. There was no such thing as through the lens metering. Shoot, my first camera had a broken light meter, so I had to make a lot of estimates prior to shooting, and then bracket. Was everyone else better than me, because they had a higher rate of well exposed images? Or were they cheating?

Using tools that have been developed over the years is not cheating, but they are not how you "win".

Hand some dude the best camera on the market, and the latest version of Photoshop, and send him out to take 10 photos, and give him all the time in the world for post.

Give me my old Minolta T100 with its busted light meter, and a roll of film, and I promise you, even with no post production, my images will be better. Period.

 

[kanabco]

Then get rid of your camera, and make a pinhole camera. I mean, from where photography started (as a tool for painters to project images onto their canvas), having a means of winding the film roll is cheating. Used to be, there were no adjustable shutters, just metal cards which shooters put carrying sized holes into, and had to be swapped out. There was no such thing as through the lens metering. Shoot, my first camera had a broken light meter, so I had to make a lot of estimates prior to shooting, and then bracket. Was everyone else better than me, because they had a higher rate of well exposed images? Or were they cheating?

Using tools that have been developed over the years is not cheating, but they are not how you "win".

Hand some dude the best camera on the market, and the latest version of Photoshop, and send him out to take 10 photos, and give him all the time in the world for post.

Give me my old Minolta T100 with its busted light meter, and a roll of film, and I promise you, even with no post production, my images will be better. Period.

WTF? you are making no sense.
You asked me

Is using an electric drill as opposed to a hand drill cheating?

I simply replied "To me it does not matter."
let me put in another way: "It does not matter to me."
or another way
"I do not care"

 

[KevinKohler]

WTF? you are making no sense.
You asked me

I simply replied "To me it does not matter."
let me put in another way: "It does not matter to me."
or another way
"I do not care"

Oh. I was simply responding to the gist of your posts, like post 25, were you said Photoshop is cheating.

 

[longview]

I think it can be safely said that artist, whatever the medium alter the actual image to reflect their own impressions.
Before digital photography, we altered photographs by selecting the time of day or weather conditions.
I always loved shooting west in morning light, the greens are more robust.
After the shot, I know people who would mask features of the image to limit exposure during part of the enlargement.
Digital just enhances the tools and makes them available to the casual photographer.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

I tried to eliminate those questions by the way I described what I felt was real photography. Filters are not dealing with software, microcomputers running software are...

Truth be told, regarding artful photography, I do like black and white the best. And I do not know where you pulled the word scorn from my description of what I appreciated most... maybe you can identify my impreciseness if it came off that way so I will not make the same lapse in the future... but I don't think I was aiming to do that, just separate the two categories and express my bias in favoring of the one over the other.

You like the idea of film photography; it is doubtful that you could tell the difference between a digital photograph and a film. That is if the artist was looking for the same outcome that you are.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

I was referring to avoiding raw and working with jpegs. Raw is unnecessary and many pros don't use them for all images.

Raw is far superior to lossless jpeg format.

RAW = uncompressed and not finalized

jpeg = compressed finalized

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

The point is, a photographer should not have to work that hard after the fact to get what he wanted in the first place. So I would disagree from a fundamental perspective.

It depends the level of work that you are doing.

 

[Gaugingcatenate]

You like the idea of film photography; it is doubtful that you could tell the difference between a digital photograph and a film. That is if the artist was looking for the same outcome that you are.

Ok, thanks I guess

 

[Patrickt]

It can take a photographer days or even weeks to work on post processing a image; it isnt cheating at all.

No, it isn't cheating because it's art but it isn't photography. A man spent eight hours coming three photographs to make one work of art. It was fine, as a work of art, but since it did not represent any actual scene that ever existed it wasn't a photograph. It is art.

 

[jet57]

It depends the level of work that you are doing.

Right; that's what I said later on. Beginners and intermediates don't have to work has hard to get the results, so for those levels I think that Photoshop is sort of cheating

The OP was kind of broad on the subject of cheating, so or my perspective I'm trying to kind of narrow it down a bit.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

Right; that's what I said later on. Beginners and intermediates don't have to work has hard to get the results, so for those levels I think that Photoshop is sort of cheating

The OP was kind of broad on the subject of cheating, so or my perspective I'm trying to kind of narrow it down a bit.

That is like saying that any aid is cheating. Where do you draw the line at?

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

No, it isn't cheating because it's art but it isn't photography. A man spent eight hours coming three photographs to make one work of art. It was fine, as a work of art, but since it did not represent any actual scene that ever existed it wasn't a photograph. It is art.

I see you are confused between digital art and digital photography.

 

[Patrickt]

I see you are confused between digital art and digital photography.

I see you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Art and Photography are not made mysterious by the word digital.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

I see you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Art and Photography are not made mysterious by the word digital.

Mysterious? I never said that anything is mysterious in this thread. Now you are just making up crap.

Here Ill make it easy for you to understand using examples.

First we have a link to digital art. The skull below is a example of digital art.

The Best Digital Art of 2014 | From up North

Next up we have digital photography. Notice that it looks just like a regular non mysterious photo? That is because it is just a photo. And like all photos be it film or digital you dont just use some cheap exposing or editing software and call it good. Good film photographers do not take this roll of film to walmart to be developed. Good photographers do not just take a photo and do no type of editing to it (even if it is just cropping).

17 Stunning Surfing Images - Digital Photography School

 

[kanabco]

Raw is far superior to lossless jpeg format.

RAW = uncompressed and not finalized

jpeg = compressed finalized

Everything you said above is true but immaterial for the "majority" of professional photographers.
What you do by posting that is muddy the waters because we have people to teach and they absorb things they do not comprehend simply because they do not understand the technology... you are not teaching.

By far the majority of professional photographers shoot JPG (if not only) because they cannot be bothered with trying to figure out the potential of a RAW file and when they finally do they discover that they would have processed the RAW file to look just like the JPG? It means RAW is less useful for most pros. Someone here was talking about shooting 500 clicks of a wedding. You certainly do not think he meant he shot raw, right? in fact I asked him and he responded "course not"
The only thing you achieve by bringing up the compressed vs uncompressed comparison of jpg vs raw is make the defacto standard (jpg) questionable. You are not teaching anything useful because the International Standards Organization (ISO) sponsors a standard for digital imaging called the "Joint Photographic Experts Group" (JPEG). They are true experts and meet three times per year and discuss how to make this ISO standard better. They are the real pros. Extolling virtue of RAW over JPG only confuses the layman. Trust me. I have been trying to convey this point for decades (I began in videography training films for the US Army long before single frame digital imaging came to be).