Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave I've just seen a supposed "photograph" on Flickr taken about a mile away from my home, in which a tourist has taken a tree and a stone cross about a hundred yards apart and digitally combined them into a single impossible image that makes them look like they are right next to each other. It's gathering admiring comments from viewers around the world who have no way of knowing that it's an utter fake, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets explored.
If that's what photography means in the 21st century then I don't want anything to do with it any more. And I'm not going to link to that particular abomination because I don't want to feed it with more views.
Hi Dave,
I have great sympathy for your view, I know its hard to accept this kind of fakery as photography and in many ways it isn't, its deceit. It sits unhappily with me too, I don't like it, Its easy to make a striking image by combining 2 mundane ones, rather than create an iconic image out of something real that exists with skill and artistic flair.
I think the issue is one of intentionally misleading, whereas if the image contained a unicorn, no I not being flippant here ive seen recently a unicorn drinking from a stream in a photograph, the fact that its an obvious fake somehow makes it more acceptable than a subtle fake like the image you quote.
I witnessed first hand just a few weeks ago the opposite issue, I witnessed a judge judging a photographic competition in the act of throwing a photograph unceremoniously out of the competition. He said this image would have been very highly placed were it not an obvious fake. It was a lighthouse sitting on a beach, he said lighthouses were never built on beaches, the author would have done better to site the lighthouse on those rocks to the left rather than rather unconvincingly on the beach.
Several people present after the fact attested that it wasn't a fake at all and they had visited that very lighthouse and yes it sat on the beach exactly as depicted. The judge was completely wrong.
What really is a fake, in my view most HDR with dark threatening skies that are totally unreal are a fake, strong manipulation like unreal over saturated colours that didn't exist in reality is a fake.
Maybe more than 80% of photography has been a fake of one kind or another for the last 15 years.
Theres a statement "A photograph never lies" that was never true, a photograph usually does lie in one form or another. As soon as you make that grass more "lively" with rich greens when a pale and uninteresting dull green existed in reality, because the vibrant green looks more "photographic" you have created a fake.
The point you have raised speaks eloquently on topic, what is post processing really doing. It is almost always changing the image, and often for the worse.
Should fakery be allowed in a photograph?
Well maybe we can resolve this simply by looking at accepted classes of photography. These are in classifications such as Landscape and Portrait. One is Record photography. Record photography is showing what is there as a record, unchanged.
Any other photography is open to manipulation whether it be changing the colours, changing the perspective or indeed changing the content. And that can mean merging two images to create a new and impossible one. I think we just have to accept that the practice will flourish.
I hope you reconsider and continue in photography, we need more photographers who take the effort with skill and flair to create fine images of what exists rather than easily cobbled up impossible dreams.