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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
01-23-2019, 03:52 PM
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But, the general evaluation of Adam's is, he was a fairly mundane photographer, but a brilliant darkroom technician. His "zone system" for making and evaluating prints is evidence of his preoccupation with "post processing." BUT, one point I tried to make, he made the final image what he saw, or thought he saw, or wanted to show, not necessarily precisely what it was.
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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
01-23-2019, 12:13 PM
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I will put forward two propositions: 1) the human eye never sees things exactly as they are; 2) no photograph records things exactly as seen by a human. Consider what the world looks like to either a bird or insect that can see ultraviolet light. How about a pit viper that can see infra red light? (And no, infrared photos do not mimic what such a snake sees, as best we can tell). Consider a frog sitting perfectly still with no breeze - what does it see? absolutely nothing insofar as there is zero activity in the optic nerves under such circumstances, but if something moves, a worm on the ground, an insect flying by, or a predatory heron sneaking up, THAT and that only the frog sees with no bokehed background, so long as the worm, bug or heron is moving. The human eye is sensitive to an enormous range of brightness, and it adjusts in a twinkling so we can almost instantly see things in darker or brighter areas that a moment earlier we could not. Does any photographic image duplicate this? As noted by the OP, we see more detail with our monochrome rod receptors than with our cone color receptors. We are blithely unaware that we have have far more resolution and far more color discrimination dead center than at the periphery of our visual field, and our total FOV approaches 180 degrees so presumably a fish-eye lens with substantial IQ and color deterioration at the edges would best mimic what our eyes see, but psychologically that is not so. We all know that HDR sometimes looks "natural" but sometimes looks like a painting, so paintings are not "natural" as the eye sees things? And we criticize vignetting, even though our eyes do it. Every image is some balance of what was there, what the eye saw, what the photographer thought he/she saw, how the photographer wants to convey what was seen or the response they had to what they saw, or thought they saw. It's all a matter of that ancient, debatable thing called "taste," or "in the mind of the beholder." I'll take a chance on any image posted on this forum, and for the most part, I almost never find one so far outside of a "photograph" that I would have cause to complain, but that doesn't mean that I like every one of them. Some speak to me, and now and then one does not. Photographs are not something whose visual qualities meet certain criteria. They are a product of equipment and process, what on labels in an art museum are listed under "medium,"
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