Originally posted by Rondec I have been thinking about what I want from my photographs a lot lately. As I look at different photography sites, I see a lot of fairly intense photoshopping. Whether it is bumping up the saturation vigorously on landscape photos, adding significant glow to portraits, or just air brushing all of the texture off a child's skin.
It seems to me that there are two philosophies of photography. One is to capture a glimpse of reality -- basically as it is. The other is to try to make your photograph into some "ideal" version of reality -- even if it looks like nothing earthly.
I do some mild photoshopping to the pics of my kids -- take out blemishes, fix snotty noses, but I really want to remember them as they are and in the same way, I want to see places as they really existed.
So, what is your philosophy of photography?
There is no such thing as an absolute "reality" only the vision you see and the vision you want to convey through the photograph. Cameras have severe limitations when trying to capture high dynamic ranges, they distort perspective, they desaturate colours in flat light, they do all sorts of things that our brains dont so, hence its nearly always impossible to reproduce a scene effectively with a camera alone.
Ansell Adams had a similar view. He exposed for shadows and developed for highlights, and used a lot of sharpening, dodging, burning and other techniques to recreate what he wanted to convey. His exposure technique made sure that the negative contained as much information as it could before he started on the second part of his creative process. But the point was, he knew what he wanted to achieve before he even pressed the shutter and he regarded the exposure, developing and printing as integral parts of the process.
If you know what a camera will do with a given scene, you can deliberately expose with a view to overcoming the cameras limitations in photoshop, provided they are within the bounds of your ability. In fact I would go as far as saying you cannot produce a convincing landscape picture (especially in hard or flat light) unless you understand how to do this. With digital, you have to expose for the highlights because under-developing is not an option but the principle is the same.
True, there are people who take this further to deliberately create fantasy scapes and this is fine, if you like that sort of thing - though its more graphic art than photography to me and its not really my thing.
However I do take exception to the practice of "faking it" in other words adding in a fake sky or superimposing something into a scene that wasnt there and trying to pass it of as reality. It seldom looks all that convincing.
Nor do I believe you can actually rescue a bad shot from a poor raw file or JPG. A bad shot will still look bad, and probably look manipulated too. By the same token you can ruin a perfectly good shot by overdoing the PP or simply not understanding how to achieve a realistic result.