Quote: Don't get me wrong, I still think people can be "purists" in that their goal is to get an image true to reality, it's just that people don't understand that 100% of the time it takes at least some "manipulation" of what the camera captured (or choice of film, or digital settings, etc) to get things closer to "reality."
People don't understand how much work I have to do to get it "exactly like it was." And then there is the issue of the real world having contrast values as high a 20,000 to one and my print at max being 120:1. You just can't put it like it was on a piece of paper. Then you have the other thing happen, I take a picture of backlit leaves with the light shining through them and people tell me my image is over saturated. Well no, in terms of what I was looking at, it's probably a little undersaturated. But whatever you want to believe.
When I look at a leaf that has, water drops on it, the water drops stand out, because I've probably seen that leaf without the water drop a hundred times before. So when I post process, I make the water drops stand out for the viewer just like it did when I looked at it. Photography captures what is going on inside your head as much as it captures what it outside your head. If you make those water drops pop off the page in PP, that reflects your psychological state at the time, the way you saw them. Reality is always filtered through your psychological state at the time. Nobody knows how it is, we don't see the full spectrum of light, everyone sees things slightly differently. And people see things through different psychological filters. There is no reality that is separate from ourselves. There is no point at which we can stand outside of reality to view it objectively and see "exactly how it is".. And you can be damn sure there's no photograph that's going to do that.
And then there are the "art" shots. Sometimes I take a shot because of what I can do with it. It has nothing to do with reality, it has to do with patterns on a page. I'm shooting with a plan, to oversaturate, bump the contrast out of sight on and make it look like a painter splashed a bunch of paint on a canvas. And because I understand the photographic process, I actually take the picture to do that to... it's art....I have absolutely no intention of capturing what's there as some part of reality.
When people go by at our booth and see out photos, we here over and over.. "they look like paintings." Most don't even care that they are photos. It's the image standing on it's own as what it is, what it came from is irrelevant. Unless of course you are on a photography forum. Then people have "ideas" about what you should and shouldn't do.
Last edited by normhead; 11-12-2012 at 03:14 PM.