[konraDarnok]

Do HDR images somehow lose one of photography's biggest appeals, namely it's honesty? Will we eventually see film returning to a bigger role in photography due to a backlash against digital photography and manipulation? I see the digital vs film discussion as being somewhat equivalent to the "studio recording vs playing live" conversations in the music world. It's great to be able to overdub and overdub a recording until you get the phrase down perfectly, but in my mind, it will never replace someone who can sit down with nothing but a piano or guitar and touch your soul.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. --Ansel Adams

You don't take a photograph, you make it. --Ansel Adams

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. --Ansel Adams

Some photographers take reality...and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. --Ansel Adams

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster. --Ansel Adams

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. --Ansel Adams

[mph]

TaoMass, I'll play along with your hijacking . I can sympathize with your viewpoint, because I think some things people do result in "graphic art" rather than "photography". But I don't think HDR is necessarily one of them. By way of example, let me show you the extreme frames from my first HDR effort. It was a technical exercise, and artistically worthless, but here goes:



The contrast range was so extreme that I could not make a tone-mapped image that was at all satisfactory using qtpfsgui. Yet when I was standing behind the camera, my eyes could see detail in both the basement shadows and the sky outside. The "straight" images from my digicam are in no way honest representations of what I perceived standing there. The human eye has far more dynamic range than either film or digital camera sensors.

It is certainly possible to take it too far, just as one can crank up the saturation too far. Heck, sometimes Velvia was "dishonest" to my eye. But I think HDR can serve us well when we try to overcome our equipment's limitations, and fully capture our perception of the scene in front of us.

[Lowell Goudge]

Well, up until fairly recently, people tended to take photographs as accurate representations of a scene. They believed what they saw in photos, as opposed to scenes that had been painted, say. That's what I mean by the honesty of photography. Painters idealize their subjects, so paintings are never regarded as entirely factual. And now, photography does that, too. There's no guarantee that the wonderful light or the great composition you're admiring in a picture ever really existed. Not that it really matters as long as the viewer accepts the photo on it's aesthetic value alone. But could the trend toward digital photography and computer manipulation also trigger a return to pure photography? Maybe contact prints from an 8X10 negative, for example?

I see no digital vs film question of honesty. All photo's are dishonest.

People move around to exclude either background or foreground, change depth of field to hid details, deliberately under or over expose to hide distracting detail in highlights or shadows, use color filters to change levels in B&W photos, use multiple exposures to superimpose one image on another (the moon is the best example of this), make 10-20 multiple exposures on a single frame to portrait motion, take long exposures to show streams flowing, freeze water drops with high shutter speeds or flashes, paint a night photo with a flashlight or strobe flashes at different objects .....

The list goes on forever, and none of the above has anything to do with the medium (film or digital), and many have nothing at all to do with what the eye sees, In fact some of the shots above are to make images the eyes cannot see.

It is everything to do with the manipulation just to take the photo.

That is why photography is an art form. Purely scientific photos, no matter how well exposed technically, are generally boring.

[TaoMaas]

So it would make no difference to you if you learned that Ansel Adams had changed out the backgrounds, added trees, and drew in fake reflections in his photos? Or added than moon over Hernandez after-the-fact? His pictures wouldn't suffer a whit of credibility loss?

[kenyee]

Try out photomatix basic (the free version).
You feed it 5 images (you can set the K10D to autobracket 5 shots w/ 1/2 stop gaps, though I wish you could do 7 and it shot faster than 1fps).
You'll get stuff like this:


where the camera wanted to do this:

Look at the blown highlights and shadows in comparison.

FWIW, I'm not into the weird surreal HDR images that I've seen so I consider this pretty subtle.
The main HDR negative is you lose some of the sharpness of the waves because they're moving...

[PaulAndAPentax]

So it would make no difference to you if you learned that Ansel Adams had changed out the backgrounds, added trees, and drew in fake reflections in his photos? Or added than moon over Hernandez after-the-fact? His pictures wouldn't suffer a whit of credibility loss?

I don't think it would if it was disclosed. HDR is usually disclosed. I don't mind its an art form. If I clone out a twig or something in a bird photo I normally say so.

[philmorley]

Do HDR images somehow lose one of photography's biggest appeals, namely it's honesty? Will we eventually see film returning to a bigger role in photography due to a backlash against digital photography and manipulation? I see the digital vs film discussion as being somewhat equivalent to the "studio recording vs playing live" conversations in the music world. It's great to be able to overdub and overdub a recording until you get the phrase down perfectly, but in my mind, it will never replace someone who can sit down with nothing but a piano or guitar and touch your soul.

didn't most (obviously not all) the great 'masters' spend huge amounts of time in the darkroom. I got a book on the zone system by chris johnson there is more in about darkroom technique then there is about photographic technique.

I'm not critising you, we all have our own ideas of how much is too much, I just dont understand the difference between photoshop and the darkroom. (I once spent half an hour on a bus listening to a lady tell me how digital photography is not the same because of fixing and manipulation in photoshop and then she spent the next half an hour of what wonderful times she used to have in the darkroom and how she would often spend a whole day on the one image in the darkroom and talked double exposures, photo montage etc etc )

---

Last edited by philmorley; 09-12-2007 at 07:04 PM.

[ricardobeat]

So it would make no difference to you if you learned that Ansel Adams had changed out the backgrounds, added trees, and drew in fake reflections in his photos? Or added than moon over Hernandez after-the-fact? His pictures wouldn't suffer a whit of credibility loss?

Nope.

Probably less than 10% of the "best pictures of all times" are shots straight from the camera, with no modifications.

Digital technology just made it easier to do what people already could by other means. You shouldn't feel betrayed by manipulated images unless you're looking at photojournalism.

[TaoMaas]

Nope.

Probably less than 10% of the "best pictures of all times" are shots straight from the camera, with no modifications.

Digital technology just made it easier to do what people already could by other means. You shouldn't feel betrayed by manipulated images unless you're looking at photojournalism.

But the modifications made to those "best pictures" didn't include adding elements that weren't in the original scene. Btw, the majority of the greatest pictures of all time come from the world of photojournalism. The impact of art photography is extremely small, in comparision. It's the ability to capture a moment of time that gives photography it's value.

[vdubbin099]

Sorry to hijack the thread, but what program do you guys use to view and save your HDR pics, in other than HDR format(or does this take away the HDR affect)? thanks

[Jonson PL]

Try out photomatix basic (the free version).
You feed it 5 images (you can set the K10D to autobracket 5 shots w/ 1/2 stop gaps, though I wish you could do 7 and it shot faster than 1fps).
You'll get stuff like this:


where the camera wanted to do this:

Look at the blown highlights and shadows in comparison.

FWIW, I'm not into the weird surreal HDR images that I've seen so I consider this pretty subtle.
The main HDR negative is you lose some of the sharpness of the waves because they're moving...

Nice picture, thanks for info

[Confused]

Hi all

Since purchasing my K10D, I have become interested in exploring the exciting possibilities that HDR photography appears to offer, but have noticed in many of the examples I've viewed online what I could perhaps best describe as a rather
'disturbing unnaturalness' to many of them.
Obviously this could be down to a number of reasons such as inexperienced or ham-fisted technique in applying the software, the quality of my laptop's screen (which I somehow doubt, as it's usually fine) or other factors of which I am presently unaware. However, seeing such photographs IN PRINT might be an entirely different ball game altogether, so I claim the right to reserve judgement on that one !

In reply to TaoMaas's comment:

Well, up until fairly recently, people tended to take photographs as accurate representations of a scene.

In general I would mainly agree with the sentiments of your slightly sweeping statement, which tends to pigeon-hole 'people' into the category of casual tourists, but this is where the term "accurate representation" is open to question. One individual's perception of "accurate" may vary widely with another's. Give 100 people the same camera and I'm convinced they will undoubtedly produce different results, according to their unique 'perception' of reality.
The factors which contribute to this subtle 'art' in digital cameras are myriad in their complexities such as sensors and the unique algorithms that are employed to interpret the resulting data and also distortions that may be present to a larger or smaller degree, due to the optical quality of the lens on the camera and so forth.....but that is an entirely different 'can of worms' altogether !

And lastly if I may address Lowell's opinion that:

All photo's are dishonest.

Well, 'sitting on the fence', I'd like to say Yes AND No.....It entirely depends upon your viewpoint !! When casually flipping through the pages of any modern women's magazine that advertises the benefits of expensive facial creams or beauty products, you'll be constantly amazed by the flawless nature of the skin of the featured model.....no blemishes, creases, spots or wrinkles to be seen ANYWHERE. Suspend your disbelief for one moment and then figure out how many hours some poor unfortunate assistant has spent digitally 'retouching' that original image to reach the desired stage of 'perfection' which fully satisfies the executives of the ad agency, before they finally commit the advert to print. Would you consider that process honest or dishonest ?
If a professional musician undertakes a recording session but cannot perform a piece in it's entirety without producing audible mistakes, is it honest or dishonest for an audio engineer to subsequently spend hours in an editing suite assembling numerous different 'takes' into a final 'perfect' version ? It's the same dilemma the world over. In the days of conventional film processing, I never had the time, space or finance to pursue this particular art, but I can do things nowadays with a fairly inexpensive piece of editing software that I simply could never have dreamt of achieving by any other means. I recently took over 700 photos at my niece's wedding reception, some of which turned out less well than I had expected, insofar that a few of them were badly underexposed. Yet with the aid of this software I was easily able to 'rescue' them, which I could not have done shooting with silver halide film ! I'm not sure whether or not you would regard this process as 'dishonest', but it certainly 'saved my bacon' in this instance and I was greatly relieved by the outcome !!!

Best regards
Richard

P.S.
(I should add that the image Kenyee chose exhibited none of the above-mentioned 'anomalies' and shows convincingly how HDR images should be done.....and if Kenyee wishes to contribute generously, my secret Swiss Bank Account number is 98302647*$^+% !)

[RodConn]

I am fascinated by the attitude that HDR is false. I grew up with silver halide B&W and remember recovering a usable image from aperture and speed estimations for a dark hall in a museum (gave a rather thin negative as I remember) and then using these for a cloudy day outdoor photo and I got a reasonable enlargement from the negative which was almost black - Do you think that I would have got a usable image with a digital - a 99% blown image would have been the result.

The point of all the above waffle is that HDR has been available with negative film for many years. The tone mapping was by choice of print paper hardness and burn and dodge.

Photomatix etc are just the method to regain the dynamic range we had with film - getting something BACK that we lost in the transition to digital.

I like HDR by the way


Full screen at Zenfolio | Rod Connan | Geelong Tour click on displayed image

and


Full screen at Zenfolio | Rod Connan | Geelong Tour click on displayed image.

and rather restrained use of HDR at


Full screen at Zenfolio | Rod Connan | Geelong Tour click on displayed image.

All of these were done in Photomatix as I feel it has the best tone mapping I have been able to find. However, it does take quite a bit of manipulation time to get the full benefit of the many controls provided

Rod

[dhulsmeyer]

CS3 go to File>Automate>Merge to HDR

Choose the images you want to include. It's really that easy.

[SCGushue]

So it would make no difference to you if you learned that Ansel Adams had changed out the backgrounds, added trees, and drew in fake reflections in his photos? Or added than moon over Hernandez after-the-fact? His pictures wouldn't suffer a whit of credibility loss?

Well, better late than never to a thread...

In reality Ansel Adams did in fact alter some of his images to remove the effects or presence of mankind that "he thought" were "out of place" in a given natural environment.

Does that fact alter one's perceptions of Adam's contribution to photography or his general photographic talent?

I would think not.

Stephen