[shigzeo]

James, wonderful whiskers and mountain the background. LOVE.

 

[Towert7]

Quote:

Claiming that a photograph is realistic is like calling a headphone neutral

 
Ah, but being the photographer, you get to see the scene in real life with your own eyes before you ever take the picture!
The same can rarely be said with audio recordings.
 
If I see a sunset, I know what it looked like and I can adjust the picture to make it match what I saw in person.
 
With audio, I have no clue how the band actually sounds when recording, so I can only go by what *I* think sounds best to me.

 

[Jon L]

Quote:

Claiming that a photograph is realistic is like calling a headphone neutral, everything is colored to some degree by artificial reproduction compared to actual human experience which itself is colored by individual perception so pick your poison and deal with it.

Not to mention Everything changes depending on lighting, natural or artificial!

 

[grokit]

Yes I was going to expand the analogy to include lighting as well as acoustics, but then decided against it for some reason.

 

[Redcarmoose]

 Any light being bent though a lens is the beginning of the whole illusion. The illusion that it is a reproduction of what we saw with our eyes. We all own selective perception and only recognize things in relation to our own experience with what is in the world. That said, I was trained by a military photographer who retired as head of medical photography in a military wing.
 
In medical photography for the military a wide angle lens in not used much due to the inherent distortion, color casts due to fluorescent  light are filtered and the whole process was to get as close to reality as possible with the photograph. Having a document for reference is essential in medical research. So in school we were always checked as to holding the print next to reality so to speak. It really had nothing to due with our opinion of how stuff should look. Our lighting was based on the most information delineated.
 
Remember too 1/4 of the photographs I post now have a level of HDR processing. I still think when I see even the slightest HDR that it is HDR and not real. OK, so maybe I'm just missing the point. When you put a polarizer on a lens to increase contrast sometimes it is more contrast than the naked eye sometimes not. When I see a photograph with clear clouds though I don't say "look at that polarizer effect" That I feel is because we do see the sky a little different than film or digital. The depth of field is sometimes close to what we see but many times we have a way of looking at things where we completely block out mentally what is not pertinent to what we want to see. I would call the process mental focus.
 
We are seeing life in HDR  with more contrast than the eye. It actually looks more like a drawing than real life to me. I'm not saying it's bad, remember I use it a lot. I just think that it is a trend and as digital gets better you are going to start to see folks going back to traditional optical ways to get sharpness and contrast." Oh ya, I remember HDR that trend kind of like airbrushing they used to use in 2011."
 
 
 

 

[shigzeo]

No HDR or uber contrast editing for the haters in this thread.
 
Been experimenting with different crops lately. Here is a square of a landscape rectangle.

 
Long rectangle (not panorama).

 
Photo I took 3 years ago with a lens now long sold and much unloved. Also square.

 

 

[Towert7]

It should also be noted, for people claiming that some photos look way too contrasty, that people have different monitors with different settings.
 
I edit my photos to look correct on a gamma correct monitor.  If I view my photos using my little 300$ netbook, my photos would look way too contrasty.
(The reverse also happens.  When I view my pictures straight from the card on my netbook they look great.  When I take them home and view them on my desktop monitor they look dull.)
I've noticed a fair amount of the new apple displays are very contrasty by default.
 
Personal preference is personal preference, but you have to keep in the back of your mind also that the same photo, viewed on different displays, can look drastically different.
 
 
 
Having said that, here's a photo for all you contrast-phobic people:

How dull and boring!  ^_^

 

[scompton]

Quote:

No misunderstandings. Properly manipulated pictures/audio can be really good and, many-a time, I find myself liking some of the proper ones. It's just that, I constantly tell myself, no, you cannot like that. That's not real.

I'm curious what you think of someone like Ansel Adams.  He was an expert manipulator.  Pretty much every thing you do with black and white film is manipulation.  IMO, unless you take your meter reading off of a grey card, your manipulating when you choose your exposure settings, with any medium.

 

[grokit]

It's called dodge and burn, and yes Adams was very good at this

 

[Redcarmoose]

Yes, He also was really fond of making the sky look black in some photographs by using a red filter. The thing is maybe with all the burning and playing with the printing process his photographs became more like light paintings. Still the pictures from Ansel Adams look natural to me just like being there.

 

[Redcarmoose]

I guess we as viewers of a photograph will always "buy in" to the fact of it being a painting. This must happen in the mind on many levels. I wonder too if there was always be folks which question any new change or advancement in the field. When panchromatic film came out it must have been quite a shock to the orthochromatic photographers. Still being able to record the true spectrum of light in the natural range and magic of nature is what I think the photographic goal is. Photographs still don't have the contrast we see in nature so HDR if used correctly bump it up to the level of having perfect lighting, the perfect lens, the perfect air quality. Some would argue that the magic of nature is still just moving along with HDR treatments in a photograph. These are the same folks which call technology an evolution of nature.


I have no MA in art but I also think that when photographs start to cross over into the realm of imagination( like painting ) they have more impact. We will all agree that Adams work was at a crispy contrast level and maybe much more than life. The fact that they are B/W is also another way we "buy in" to the fact that we are seeing something not real. What was Adams doing in the printing process? Was he keyed into something about nature beyond what was in the photograph to start with? Is there a message in his work that bypass our seeing the photographs as fake? Why is it that HDR color photographs look more natural when converted to black and white?

 I would agree that Adams work does look like HDR converted to black and white at times. He wanted us to say "Wow!" You can't say that it looks just like being there but there is a message in the line drawing of black and white which conveys the feeling of being there. That is why people like his work.
Quote:

I'm curious what you think of someone like Ansel Adams.  He was an expert manipulator.  Pretty much every thing you do with black and white film is manipulation.  IMO, unless you take your meter reading off of a grey card, your manipulating when you choose your exposure settings, with any medium.

 


Quote:

It's called dodge and burn, and yes Adams was very good at this

 

 

[scompton]

Quote:

It's called dodge and burn, and yes Adams was very good at this

He went way beyond dodge and burn.  He wrote 3 books, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, and the last 2 especially, are pretty much all about manipulation. 

 

[JadeEast]

Quote:

The thing is maybe with all the burning and playing with the printing process his photographs became more like light paintings. Still the pictures from Ansel Adams look natural to me just like being there.

 
Adams was specifically working against photography being painterly; he was one of the "straight" photographers working to contrast the softer impressionistic style of pictorialism. 
 
 

 

[shigzeo]

5 images taken today, all B&W, all with the D200. One image was taken with the 50 1,2 Ai, the rest with the 180 2,8 ED AiS.
 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

[Towert7]

I know Japan has some spectacular landscapes, but gee, the city you've photographed here... well... to put it nicely it looks so cramped and depressing.  Chain fences, wire guards around the light bulbs, the spaghetti of cables overhead, house ontop of house ontop of house.
 
Japanese culture can be fun, but I wouldn't want to live in a place like that.
 
The photos being in Grayscale probably doesn't help my feeling either, making it look even more congested.