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02-03-2009, 04:10 AM   #1
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A philosophical question

We all know that the path of light through a modern DSLR is complex:

First through the lens coatings, than lens design, then the design and
implementation of the sensor, then, perhaps, through the camera's
processing engine with it's myriad of default, factory and user settings
to the so-called "final" file on your hard drive. Then, of course, there
is the design and quality of the viewfinder, the calibration of your
monitor, the file format etc etc - I could go on and on.

Question:
Given all that do you tend to think of a camera as capable of producing
a more or less objective accurate reflection of "reality" that is then
downloaded to your computer in the form of a unprocessed image file and
that any deviation from reality reflected in the file is probably the
result of poor technique...

...or...

...do you think of the final downloaded image file direct from the
camera as merely digital silly putty that is just the raw material from
which you will create a final image that conforms to your vision of what
the image "should" be? In other words the "final" downloaded file from
the camera is, potentially, just a beginning and that there is nothing
final about it at all.

I'm not talking about PP for the purposes of expressing extreme
subjective artistic content but in both cases the final goal is simply
fidelity and accuracy to the physical reality in front of you when you
first pressed the shutter release.

What say you?
Inquiring minds want to know

Wildman


Last edited by wildman; 02-03-2009 at 04:22 AM.
02-03-2009, 04:24 AM   #2
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My point of view is that I'd really like to depend on my camera and lenses to achieve "all that do you tend to think of a camera as capable of producing a more or less objective accurate reflection of reality", but given the limits of technology as of February 03, 2009, I find achieving that 100% of the time to be impossible, therefore I also subscribe to the school of thought that "downloaded image file direct from the camera as merely digital silly putty that is just the raw material from which you will create a final image that conforms to your vision of what the image "should" be? In other word the "final" downloaded file from the camera is, potentially, just a beginning and that there is nothing final about it at all" some of the time as well.

I think I view them both, one as an optimist and a bit of a dreamer, and the other as a realist and with a rational eye when it comes to when I see my photographs as "complete"

Jason
02-03-2009, 05:24 AM   #3
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I think both your points are valid. Photography has multiple uses.

On one hand, it is a scientific method for measurement under controlled environment. For example, a forensic photographer will not perform PP on their photos.

On the other hand, the majority of us are following an artistic path. We like to expresses our subjective and personal observation as we wish our spectators to see. PP enhances this.

I notice many photography teaching materials constantly preaching about fidelity and accuracy, I disagree. Like every other art, it is never objective. Otherwise we wouldn’t have impressionism and the many great artists.
02-03-2009, 05:51 AM   #4
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This may sound a little weird, but I tend to try to use my camera to capture what could be called "remembered reality". I think that people tend to remember life in little snippets. We don't remember a whole experience as much as we recall specific parts. And I think we also tend to remember somewhat enhanced versions of these snippets. It's these enhanced snippets that I try to capture (only sometimes successfully, I might add.) Someone called it "showing the ordinary in an extraordinary way". While I do think the unaltered file from my camera gives a fairly objective view of a subject, I don't think that will necessarily lead my viewers to say, "That's the way I remember it/him/her", so a little post processing is needed to get to where I want to go.

02-03-2009, 07:33 AM   #5
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Here's a snippet of a realistic looking painting by Jan Vermeer.

This image was heavily processed by his optical system and mind. The light on her face is sunlight; no digital camera that I have ever used would have shown the other side of her nose as anything but jet black*.

But he was being honest in what he saw; in effect, his mind took a piecewise HDR image of this scene then tone-mapped it onto a smaller dynamic range display.

In that sense, PP is not cheating, rather it is partially accommodating the interpretive capabilities of our visual processing system by using tricks to squish an image onto a small display in order to better represent reality. Vermeer's image looks more realistic than an precise recording of linearly reproduced light intensities would appear.

Anyhow, that's what I think.

Dave

*I used to exploit the non-linearity of film & heavily post process during printing by "burning in" the too dark areas and "dodging" the too bright - the same thing tone mapping does.

Last edited by newarts; 02-03-2009 at 08:50 AM.
02-03-2009, 07:40 AM   #6
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i think of my downloaded image as silly putty

but, if we are going to use your silly putty example, i am limited to what i can do, since i only have one clump of silly putty

so getting the best clump before modling, would be ideal.

02-03-2009, 08:46 AM   #7
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I think of using the camera and postprocessing together to capture the same type of perception of reality that I go for when I create.

It's a complete fallacy to assume there is one and only one true-to-life photographic representation of a scene. When viewing a real scene, the dynamic range is always far greater than what can be recorded on a piece of paper or viewed on a comuter monitor. Our eyes constantly dance around a scene, our pupils opening and closing to adjust for differences in light. We also have binocular cues as to depth - the fact that we view a scene with two eyes helps us gauge distances like a rangefinder. Throw in our ability to concentrate on some aspects of a scene and ignore others, and the selectiveness of our memories, and our perception of a scene really has little do with any two-dimensional representation of it.

I don't take that as carte blanche to do whatever I want in PP (although it doesn't bother me if others do). I take it as a responsibility to make sure my image captures what it is I thought worth perceiving about the scene, but also to filter it through my own purely aesthetic sense.

02-03-2009, 09:56 AM   #8
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Lots of good and wise responses which I concur with. This question comes up a lot and I dont know why. After all, where is it "written" and in what holy scripture that the purpose of photography is to "represent reality".

Let me ask you this. Would you ask the same question about video or movie cameras?

It may be the purpose of some kinds of photography to represent reality but even then some PP will be required to remove CA and distortion and overcome DR limitations of most cameras and make it look even half real to start with.

Besides a frozen moment captured in a tiny 3:2 window with distorted perspective superimposed onto a 2D surface is never going to be real however much we would like it to be. Photojournalists and paperazzi are very good at manipulating this fact to misrepresent reality all the time. They get away with it because people assume (wrongly) that it must indeed be real because its a photograph, but its as real as hearing a few words out of a conversation or (as normal journalists also do) taking words out of context.

For other photographic purposes, reality is somewhat overrated or even to be discouraged. Do you really want to see that the bride has a zit on her nose or the groom looks worse for wear after the stag night (bachelor party).

I have never seen an image that blew me away that did not have a combination of top rate execution AND top rate post production and if the end effect is startling or beautiful or moving then who cares if its real? I'm sure the ad agency doesn't.

I assume all the people that demand "reality" in photography only ever watch the news on TV and think movies and sitcoms are silly and that acting is a sin. (Or got very upset when they found out that X files was not a documentary)
02-03-2009, 10:08 AM   #9
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My skills in PP aren't good enough at this point to change a photo very much beyond what I shot but I do fiddle with the light and color to make the photos look a little better. Many times I have looked honestly at that "kind of dark" exposure and remembering that the issue wasn't my settings or exposure but it was just a plain "dark" day and the camera was quite accurate. Its quite easy for for even the greenest beginner to make those kind of changes because the photo looks underexposed. I mention this because I shoot out in the woods a lot and I know places where you almost need a flashlight on a sunny afternoon. To take photos there you automaticly overexpose a little and probably fiddle a little in PP. You get a nice looking picture but not an accurate record of the dark woods you were in. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
You could carry the issue even further by saying that using a flash is cheating because you have created artificial lighting. You can take photos at night of things your eyes can hardly see using a flash.
My goal in photography is to have pictures that are nice to look at and hang on the wall or put in albums and and modern PP software makes it that much easier.
02-03-2009, 10:36 AM   #10
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First of all, isn't it funny that Silly Putty is called Intelligent Putty in German (Intelligente Knete, Hüpfknete, Zauberknete)?

As for the question. I consider the captured data as Silly Putty which basically serves to re-create the emotion I felt when shooting the image.

The technical qualities of the captured raw image are so much inferior to the human eye (as has been stated) that it needs a dose of post-processing to come close.

An even higher level of art is this (and I don't yet master it): I shoot an image for the sole purpose of gathering raw material in order to later create an image I had in mind in the first place. Here, everything is allowed (collage, change of background etc.). However, that kind of art wouldn't be permissable in a photo gallery like PPG.

On the other hand, I noticed that a too strong dose of processing destroys information and emotion which was already present in the raw image.
02-03-2009, 04:45 PM   #11
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Original Poster
Some interesting thoughts on this question.

For myself I'm firmly in the silly putty side of the question. Not so much for creative reasons but for what, I believe, are good sound technical reasons.

I take a lot of bird pics. Before I'm a bird photographer I'm a bird and wildlife lover. I respect their beauty in a natural environment and part of that respect is accurate color rendition.

After 50 years of being in both photography and birding I can tell you that no consumer photography system comes even close to an accurate rendering of the subtleties of a bird's plumage. I have even gone so far as to take pictures of mounted birds at the Natural History museum and with one hand holding the mounted bird comparing the mounted bird to what I see on screen. No even close.

So if this is true why labor under the false assumption that somehow the photo system is capable of giving an accurate image of reality and just accept that, at best, it only gives a crude approximation and go on from there?

When I first open a new file all I ask is how far off is it going to be? Is it close enough that with a reasonable amount of PP can I recover some of that "reality" that I first saw with my naked eye?

Anyway thanks for all the thoughtful posts - they have given me much food for thought.

My best to you all and thank you,
Wildman

PS:
There is good reason that it is generally accepted among experienced birders that the best field manuals use artist renderings of birds rather than photographs for accurate field identification purposes.

Last edited by wildman; 02-03-2009 at 04:51 PM.
02-03-2009, 06:28 PM   #12
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This is a hard one for me. On the one hand, I take a pretty large dislike to processing that makes things "hyper-realistic", or better than they could actually be in real life. Product photography and fashion photography are often guilty of this. I don't like it because I feel like it is dishonest, and because I feel like it tends to highlight the imperfection of everyday life.

On the other hand, the very nature of our memories tend to make things better than they actually were, it has been shown in various studies that we idealize the past and emphasize the good things more than the bad.

Ultimately it is one of the key decisions on what kind of photographer we want to be. I see 4 options:
1. We are faithful to the original photons, or the original camera processing. Edit as little as possible.
2. We are faithful to the memory, trying to capture things exactly as they "seemed" without regard for how they really were? We edit, but only to overcome gaps between what the camera captures and what the individual percieves.
3. We are faithful to an artists' vision - the camera and associated tools are manipulated to create an image that replicates what an artist conceives. This makes more sense in an abstract context.
4. We are faithful to the desired reality, trying to edit things to make them look as we wish them to be.

I have little or no desire to ever engage in the 4th practice. I think an entirely different art begins there, one which has little or nothing to do with the first 3.

I have the utmost respect for the other 3 disciplines.
02-03-2009, 07:21 PM   #13
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