[Alliecat]

A little bit of sour grapes perhaps, but finally reached the "ARGH!" point with the current trend to process photos to extremes; plus being reminded of the PF threads on stupid things people say to photographers. I'm not against "digital art", but I'm a bit bored with the increasing trend that everything has to be so processed that it doesn't look natural. An outdoor photography magazine's online contest entries are all super-saturated, crazy contrast... a magazine's contest results were processed into dreary colours ...(no, I didn't enter either; just browsing). I like nice colours; I like fantasy-landscape effects, but not ALL the time, & since I'm more into shooting "natural-looking" scenery, I find the need to overdo it increasingly ... well... too-much.
The final straw was a photo I just saw of a waterfront, with some kind of weird HDR attempt grad-filtered to death with a dark grey pall over an otherwise nice sky with fluffy clouds... of course the people who didn't like it aren't going to post comments that they didn't like it... but the latest comment was from someone asking, "Did you actually take this photo yourself? I need one of those cameras!" !!! And that was the point where I went "ARGH!!!"
I know, I know... art is very subjective. I hate a lot of the abstract photography I've seen, yet I sometimes like doing a few myself. I don't do a lot of photoshopping, but have played a little with it. Anything I alter in a major way is just for fun. I would not put it up against a "natural" shot & expect it to be fair competition.
Maybe it's just a bit of backlash, as a filmie, against how natural-looking photos don't seem to be "enough" anymore.
Anyway, rant over. Now y'all can disagree with me...

[RioRico]

The argument goes back to about 1860: the naturalists vs the artists|manipulators. It hasn't been resolved for over 150 years. It probably won't be resolved anytime soon. Relax. Take your shoes off. [Whew, not here, please!] Have a nice cup of decaf chai. Feeling better? Good.

[calsan]

Tasteless is IN!

Facebook buys Instagram = $1,000,000,000.
Ricoh buys Pentax = $124,200,000

Yep. That says it all really. An silly little app that tweaks camera phone photos to look like polaroids or worse is worth eight times more than Pentax.

[Alliecat]

The argument goes back to about 1860: the naturalists vs the artists|manipulators. It hasn't been resolved for over 150 years. It probably won't be resolved anytime soon. Relax. Take your shoes off. [Whew, not here, please!] Have a nice cup of decaf chai. Feeling better? Good.

I haven't had real shoes on in over a week since I got a second degree burn on my foot. Maybe that's another reason I'm in such a bad mood. So there.
I'm sure the argument between realism & manipulation goes back well beyond that.
(Cave man to 2nd cave man: "Why the heck did you make the animals all spindly like that? That's not what they look like...")
Just sayin'.

[Clavius]

Don't get me wrong: I agree fully. But I'm going to play devil's advocate just a little. I like doing HDR, I like it a lot. And it's very easy to get carried away with it. (Google Trey Ratcliff, he should be into oilpainting instead of photography.) The trick with HDR is, to use it for what it's intended to do: capture the scene as it was, including the dark shadows and bright highlights. Without having the camera flattening it because of its limitations. But again, it's a bit difficult to hold back sometimes.

[magkelly]

It really depends. Sometimes I want things to look relatively natural. Like when I'm doing correction work on someone's skin. I definitely don't like to use liquify much nor do I tend to HDR every landscape. But it can be fun sometimes to do something a little bright and weird just for fun. I actually like a lot of 60's psychedelic artwork so sometimes I have some fun with gradients or I do a color cast on a moody sky with a moon to make it look like something out of a Hammer film. I definitely like bright colors with things like macro bugs, but mostly I just like to pop things a little bit and leave it at that.

[philbaum]

Artists have been rebelling against conventions and rules like forever. Its a healthy tradition. Painters have been around a lot longer than photography has so that field has a lot more examples of trying out new forms of art. Surrealism (like Henri Cartier-Bresson was involved in), impressionism, are a few examples that were not considered acceptable when first introduced.

Is HDR tasteless or something good?. Doesn't matter, it will either grow or fade in use. What matters is that people feel free to try out new stuff and experiment. A coupla years ago, i liked HDR a lot, now use it not so much. Water finds its own level, and so will photography over time. There will be something new in photography that will come along to shock and appall us. Thats how we will know that the artistic spirit is alive and well.

[twitch]

I don't mind what other people do to their photos including way over the top HDR, fake film look, whatever. I develop my own photos to my own taste.

[altopiet]

I don't mind what other people do to their photos including way over the top HDR, fake film look, whatever. I develop my own photos to my own taste.

[RioRico]

Has anyone looked at my profile? Among my interests: "capturing and torturing sounds and images". That's an important part of the picture-making process -- torturing captive images. Yeah sure, some may escape fairly intact, but those are flukes. If I haven't twisted and prodded and eviscerated pictures, where's the fun?

[Macario]

I do agree with you, to a point. I can’t stand the overprocessed HDR images either. But then again, I can’t stand “natural” looking pictures either. Or better said, the sentence, This is how it was, this is naturally looking. Well, I really don’t care. As 100% of the time, I will have no clue of how it looked naturally when the photo was taken. And neither will anyone who took the shot themselves either. As when you get home, there is no way you will remember how it looked liked when you took the shot (and then we are not even yet talking about calibrated monitors etc), you will have some idea of how it did look like, but you won’t know for sure. Even when film was the norm, there weren’t really many “natural” photo’s out there. Landscapers used Velvia for the rich colors (nothing natural about that), or Kodak with sunset/rise to enhance the red and yellows (also nothing natural about that) Etc. In my mind the only films that came close to natural where the 160ASA films made by Fuji and Kodak (and then they had to be stored in the right way, otherwise you would be screwed there too). Me as a mainly B&W photographer, never even looked at naturally colors etc (B&W is hardly natural, except for some). Just looked at what I wanted to take a photo of, in my own interpretation.
I just want to look at nice, funny beautifull, cool etc photo’s, and I don’t care how they were made to look like.

But as I wrote, I do agree with you about the HDR shots, but that is also because it really has become a trick. A HDR photo can be something that you cannot notice in the shot (what HDR was invented for), or it can be over the top. Which to me is fine, as long it enhances the picture. Which in many cases, it just doesn’t. It is just a trick, because you can. Same goes with many skills, like long shutterspeeds of moving water. So you get a nice dreamy shot. Yes it is nice, but it has been done now so many times, in places where it shouldn’t be used. It is moving water, so I want to see movement in it, not just milky stuff. If you do it, do it when it will enhance a shot, otherwise, please don’t. ( or actually, please do, we all need to learn and improve our skills. And the only way we can, is to take shots and let others praise and/or criticize them)

[Clavius]

It is just a trick, because you can. Same goes with many skills, like long shutterspeeds of moving water. So you get a nice dreamy shot. Yes it is nice, but it has been done now so many times, in places where it shouldn’t be used. It is moving water, so I want to see movement in it, not just milky stuff. If you do it, do it when it will enhance a shot, otherwise, please don’t.

I agree, another example is thin DOF. Some think using the largest aperture always enhances a shot. Another flower with only the center in focus and the front and back petals out of focus. Or a portrait with the eyes in focus, but the nose and ears not. It's just not aesthetically pleasing.

[TaoMaas]

A little bit of sour grapes perhaps, but finally reached the "ARGH!" point with the current trend to process photos to extremes....

I feel your pain. HDR isn't going to go away anytime soon, but I expect it to level off once the "new" goes away.

[JimJohnson]

A bit of makeup on a woman looks pretty good. Taken to the extreme is a whole other thing. But where to draw the line designating the difference is a pretty personal thing and varies with the occasion. Same thing with photography post-processing; the trick is to apply just enough makeup for the occasion to bring out the beauty without making the whole thing look garish (unless the occasion calls for garish).

My own personal goal is to compose and expose to the best of my ability under the circumstances I find myself, always with the hope that no post processing is required. For others, the joy is in post processing to create the image they wanted to see when they pushed the shutter button. Both camps produce winning and losing photographs. And the general public knows full well when either camp has pushed their viewpoint too far. Take a look at the thread "Pictures by newbies" in the K-r thread and you'll see what I mean. Some of those folks may be new to the K-r, but they are by no means new to photography.

[RioRico]

Whatever we shoot, remember: What we think we see, what we want to see, what the camera+lens see, and what's really there (if anything), ain't the same. Converting a shot to B&W is a gross distortion, no matter what filtering we use -- the world just DOESN'T look like that. Many digicams are programmed to pump-up saturation and contrast because that's what many users seem to want to see. We and our gear see selectively.

Sometimes (if we think we know what we're doing) we can choose between making an image that's photographic, or just graphic. I'll shoot or PP with extreme contrast or blaring colors or distorted angles because those are needed for the images I want to produce. Posterization, solarization, perspective-bending, HDR, desaturation, pixelization, all have their place in our toolkits. I don't always want to produce snapshots. Making images takes work.

Most display advertising uses heavily-processed images. 'Natural' shots don't sell. Tis fine for amateurs and dilettantes and crime-scene toggers to insist on minimal processing. But even before photography was my job, I was trained for DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE THE SHOT. And that often includes heavy processing. Yeah, some images look like crap, you wouldn't want them hanging on your living-room wall. But they may be just what are needed for media covers, posters, etc. Don't feel limited to reality. Reality is much over-rated. I'll take a well-designed fantasy any day, thanks.