To an overwhelming number of people taking photographs, those photographs come from cameras, maybe film, maybe digital, maybe negatives, and maybe slides. While “technically speaking”, what you wrote is correct, 99.999% of people would have no understanding.
What is a “plane”? To most of us, it’s how we fly. To a few of us, it’s a tool to make wood flat. Words can have different meanings to different people, and while in Joanna’s mind, she created a photograph by controlling light, I doubt many people will understand, let alone agree.
I’ve lost any desire to argue about this - to me, a photograph is what comes from a camera, when someone presses a shutter release button to capture what they see. This has nothing to do with the “rules” of photojournalism, or strange types of lighting (infrared, ultraviolet), or any number of other tricky questions. Again, to me, once someone edits the image “too much”, it is no longer a photograph, it’s either an image, or an edited photograph. Again, “to me”.
I agree, that’s the future, like it or not. But I hope we don’t refer to the result as a “photograph”.
Mark, you’re mostly correct, but don’t most of us do the types of photography we enjoy doing? Breaking the rules and standards is fine, as long as one doesn’t try to pass it of as “reality”. Me? I do enjoy the other types of photography, when I’m in the mood to do so. I just got back from NYC, and will post my favorite photo below, which shows exactly what I was trying to show. Perhaps @Joanna will tear it apart, or maybe she will see it through my eyes. Yes, my mind of what a “photograph” is, isn’t made up - it’s what the overwhelming percentage of photographers think - photographs come from cameras. Of course they CAN come from other sources, but why are the words “photo”, photograph", “photographers” so similar? The person creating them can simply call them “images”, which can come from a much larger number of sources, with cameras being just one of them. Anyway, over the past few days, I no longer feel like debating this. If you think I’m what you just wrote, so be it. That’s not the way I feel, but I’ve been called much worse. …and no, I’m not bothered by out-of-the-box creativity, as I enjoy doing that myself, regardless of what I usually write here. But who cares? If you want to feel that way about me, that is fine with me.
Again, I agree.
Me too.
Some (not all) people feel that way about the word “photograph”. Based on that point of view, it is no longer a photograph. Others couldn’t care less. People usually don’t like to be “fooled”, and I would think that 99% of the people capturing an image would have no idea that a “small distraction” could be removed, let alone knowing it even can be done at all.
For the most part I don’t care, but for the most part photos either ARE or ARE NOT edited to something beyond what the camera already did. To me it’s important. To most people, they don’t even know it can be done at all, therefor it’s nothing worth talking about.
I got to spend a few days in New York and Massachusetts, and while my original goal was to shoot “lower Manhattan” with all the shiny new buildings, looking new, that’s not typical of Manhattan. The photo I took that I enjoy the most was near 79th Street and Madison Avenue, where it was a mix of “new” and “old” and “very old”.
I brought the D780, and my (lighter and smaller) 24-85 which look up less room in my carry-on bag. I did capture the image I wanted, but it may not represent what most people think of when you mention New York.
It does “FEEL” like what I experienced, although with good timing the light had just changed to green, and I wasn’t yet overwhelmed by cars. I wanted a New York Bagel Shop included, and got that. Sadly, there were no street vendors around for this photo.
Did it “work”? I dunno. I think it worked “too well”, as it looks like a snapshot (which I wanted) but it almost looks “posed”, due to my timing. If you look at it full size, you’ll find a LOT of detail that isn’t apparent in the small size view. If I printed photos, this is one I would certainly print, and hang in my apartment, reminding me of where I grew up.
Maybe I’m guilty of “distorting things”, as the finished image does show what I want to show, but the raw image (the reality) shows how much I cropped away to get the effect I wanted.
I also took photos of tractors, cows, flowers, and bees, as well as family and friends. but this image is what was on my mind when I flew to NYC. Everything else was “extra”.
This is where you and I start to have a problem. There is no camera, absolutely none, that can capture absolutely reality. Not digital cameras or film cameras. The reality we think we’re seeing in a photograph is just an illusion we are willing to accept as reality.
Are black and white images reality?
Are multiple film emulsions with colors that significantly differ from each other, not to mention what the eye actually saw, examples of reality?
Are images that are framed in a way that leaves meaningful components out of the final image changing its interpretation examples of reality?
Does removing a small piece of garbage or a branch appearing to be growing from the back of someone’s head in an image change the story the picture is trying to tell so much that it no longer represents your idea of reality?
If I am taking an image of a scene and physically remove an old tire from it so does not spoil the aesthetic of the final image is the result different in any meaningful way if Instead remove it electronically?
So, what actually is this reality thing you’re so obsessed with? How about giving us an absolute irrefutable definition that we could all agree on. Or, as I suspect, is your idea of reality basically just a personal opinion. Once again your rules and definitions are based on a set of artificial standards to create a baseline for very specific purposes that really no longer applies to you or to most of us on this site.
Every single part of these images is a photograph. What Hockney has done is record what the eye sees before the brain has a chance to stitch everything together, placing more emphasis on things that he noticed the most by printing that part of the scene bigger.
This is far closer than the “reality” you try to impose on the world by cropping out what you don’t want to see, even though what you saw was much more than what you recorded.
And who exactly, in the non-journalistic, non-competition world, decides what is “too much”?
What “rules”? What “standards”? Decided by whom?
You want to know something? I don’t enter competitions because I would rather have the approval of folks wanting to pay for prints of my photos than a meaningless prize in exchange for the organiser being able to use my photo, royalty free, for the rest of my life.
What about the scenario where I remove the offending piece of garbage before I take the photo? What if I wait for the offending vehicle to be moved? In both cases, I have altered the “reality” of the moment I arrived at the location.
And, if I entitled a photograph “Sunday Afternoon at the Park”? The reality is that people came and went throughout the afternoon, the wind blew leaves and garbage from one place to another, the park keeper tidied away the garbage several times during the afternoon,. At what point do I press the shutter and declare that to be “reality”?
And so, if you setup the camera to edit the image by imposing a filmic look and feel, or took an in-camera multi-shot, that’s alright?
How do you, as a photographer convey that it was a blazingly hot sunny day, where you had to squint to look? Or, a dull day where you had to peer hard to perceive anything? Well, for a start, you would adjust the settings on your camera so that it could record the detail, knowing that, if you left things as they were, the photo would be either blown to bits or blocked into oblivion. Or do you leave the photo as high-key, but without detail in the highlights?
Or any other large, skyscraper infested, American city.
Well, under your self-imposed rules, you can’t call it a photograph, mainly because you brightened the bagel shop front. You corrected the vertical perspective and you over-exposed the back of a street sign and should have taken it again to avoid having to correct it after the fact.
And yet, a lot of what the RAW image contains, like shadow detail, you haven’t bothered to reveal, even though you could see it with your naked eye.
Don’t forget that the human eye can perceive up to 20 stops of dynamic range but a modern, high quality, RAW image can only record around 14 stops.
A film camera is even worse. I use Fuji Velvia 100 transparency film and it is only capable of recording 5 stops of dynamic range. In an attempt to record more, I have to use graduated filters and can only really do that where the dark and light areas meet over straight lines.
Black and white negative film is better and can record up to around 10 stops but, in order to get a good image, I would also have to use grad filters and over-expose and under-develop to bring out the detail. So, are you saying that, by using b&W film and manipulating the development after the film has left the camera, then dodging and burning under the enlarger, that I am not creating a photograph?
Oh, you mean that tiny portion of the image that is barely visible on the left? If it was so important, why didn’t you make it more prominent? Proportionally, the window isn’t much larger than the trash can.
It may be what you saw, but it doesn’t convey how you felt. It’s jut a record shot of a “bunch of stuff”. And, according to Google Street View, it doesn’t convey what I would expect…
Which is OK if all you want is a souvenir. But true photography is about so much more than that. There is no composition to speak of and certainly nothing that would encourage me to want a copy.
You are correct, but you already know this. A camera can only capture what it can “see”. At that moment in time, from that location unless someone tries to deliberately fool the camera (such as maybe with a mirror) that was the “reality”, at least as I see it. Wide angle or telephoto lenses seem to distort that reality, unless you view the photo from the appropriate distance. Maybe you can offer some other suggestions, as to when you feel a camera is not capturing “reality”? There’s a whole world of “trick photography”, but most people just raise their camera to their eye, and capture the image.
Yes. As viewed in black and white. People can trick color images simply by using colored filters.
Yes - for that film.
My reality? If you remove it before taking the photo, it is still a photograph. If you remove it afterwards, it is not. It’s an edited photograph, or simply an “image”.
In my opinion, if you want to call it a “photograph”, yes. If you use a different word, perhaps “image” call it whatever you want.
Obsessed? Not really, if it’s a photograph, to me, it is what your camera captured. If you want to remove a tire, or replace a sky, it is not. If it’s your photo, you can follow whatever rules you wish to, and call it anything you want. If you want to be deceptive, chances are nobody will notice or care, and they will consider you to be a good photographer. Only you will know the truth.
You wrote that, not me.
To me, in the commonly accepted usage of the word “photograph”, it isn’t. Anybody seeing it will assume he used a camera. What it really is - “calotype”.
calotype , early photographic technique invented by William Henry Fox Talbot of Great Britain in the 1830s. In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura; those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image.
Multiple photographs.
Brilliant idea - fascinating. I agree with you. But the end result is not a photograph; it is many photographs combined together into one image.
Apparently everyone needs to make their own choices. I thought it was obvious. Apparently I was wrong, or we wouldn’t be debating this…
I understand your point of view.
Mine is that I take photographs because I enjoy doing so, and sharing them.
I’m quite obviously not as talented as you, and some other people here. I’m also not as strong/tall/old/young/whatever people here. They, and you, are obviously entitled to their opinion. And sometimes, as in the next photo I will post, I do it just for fun, because I enjoy doing so!
I agree. Many people wait for the “perfect moment”.
Easy, at what you feel is the appropriate moment for the photograph you are taking. Maybe the wait is seconds, or minutes, or hours, or days. Me? I’ll wait, but perhaps for a minute or two, after which I usually need to move on. But this is all part of “timing” which you have explained in detail many times, and which I try to follow as best I can.
I would very much appreciate your advice on these questions.
You are allowing your feelings about “skyscraper infested cities” to overwhelm you. I’m not as good at this as you, but I try to make do, the best I can, with what I’ve got, and if possible to create a photograph that most people will enjoy looking at - which is not always possible, apparently. The photographer can make things appear beautiful, or ugly. I prefer “beautiful”. Having grown up in a skyscraper infested city, my feelings are very different from yours, but many photographers have created beautiful photographs of New York City.
Maybe that’s why I did NOT call it a photograph - I would use “image”, or simply “photo”, or perhaps “picture”. It very much WAS a photograph before I edited it in PhotoLab, no trickery, just waiting for the best time to capture it, and how/where to aim my camera.
You are correct. I captured in the above image what I wanted to show, and given your ability, and a lot more time, perhaps I could have ended up with an image such as what you might do.
I’d be very happy if you once again edited it YOUR way, so I could compare them. But you have no way of knowing what was important TO ME. Studying your (and Wolfgang’s) .dop files has been invaluable to me, as a learning tool.
Because I didn’t want to - it was a small part of the image, but with my eye, I could see through the glass window, so I fixed that a little. I didn’t want it more prominent - the sign was all I really needed.
Thanks for posting the Google Street View photo - but I have never, ever, seen New York streets this empty. Anyway, while I’m sure your version would be better than mine, I like the image posted.
Certainly not a “serious photo”, but I was in a huge farm in Massachusetts, and the barn was open for visitors, and it was feeding time for the cows. I took lots of different images, but this is the one that put a smile on my face!
I probably took 20 or 30 images, and gradually some of the cows started paying more attention to me, while I was paying more attention to how they were reacting with each other. I tried to focus on the eyes but my camera seemed to want to focus on the noses (bigger, I guess). Check the tongue on the middle cow kissing the cow on my right.
Eventually I did walk up and “pet them”, especially the cow on the left, which they seemed to enjoy.
Probably too much editing, but PhotoLab allowed me to create exactly what I was after.
That’s their food on the ground in the lower part of the photo, and as I walked away, they went back to eating.
It was a fun day, and I got more than I expected. Maybe I’ll send the owners of the farm a copy of this photo.
I still haven’t seen a good definition from you of what reality is in photographs. After all you used the word reality as if it is an absolute. If you can’t produce a logical definition that we can all agree on with regard to reality in photography then the definition you use is just opinion, not fact. You, of course, can believe in anything you want, but beliefs in themselves don’t necessarily make them facts.
The camera records the object it sees through its mechanical nature and lens, and the image which results is therefore not reality, but reality as seen through the camera .
Wait, are you saying in order for it to be a photograph it must be processed after It comes out of the camera? Are you really saying that? Based on that definition, a JPEG file directly out of a camera and viewed on a computer Is not a photograph. Is that what you’re saying?
Take a look at the work of some of the paintings by the old masters. Are they any less a painting because the artist moved a tree or even part of the landscape (which they often did)? No, people commissioned artists to record their existence, but also, their wealth or social standing. There is a whole language to interpreting paintings, finding the back story that the artist wove into the canvas.
It’s the same with photographers. Apart from the obsessive critics who insist that they have the only truth on what is a “real” representation, I would say, virtually the whole world accepts that not everything seen by the photographer was necessarily exactly as it was by the time the photograph was “completed”.
One of the big problems I have with your “images” is that they don’t stir any emotions or feelings. They are simply snapshot records of what was in front of you uninteresting and uncomposed.
That’s just plain silly.
Not so. No camera was used - just a contact print of the leaf by exposure to sunlight. But, whatever the technique used, the result is universally acknowledged as a photograph.
Perfectly reasonable colour pictures - nothing has been taken away or added…
…except they were not taken on colour film.
I made these using the Trichromie process, which involves taking three B&W negatives, one through red filter, one through a green filter and another through a blue filter. Then the three scanned images were combined in Photoshop.
It’s not a “trick”, it’s just an old technique for doing what modern sensors do - reading data from pixels in the sensor with red, green and blue filters in front of them. But is most definitely just as much a single photograph as anything you can make in your digital camera.
And, if I capture multiple shots with the same camera, and the camera combines them, that still makes one photograph, captured in one image file.
You seem to forget that RAW data is not an image, it is just a collection of voltage levels affecting multiple pixels, or photo sites on the sensor. What you get out of your camera, on the memory card, is not even an image, it is a data file. In order to see that image, you need to use software to “decode” those data and make sense of them as an image.
A RAW file does not record the actual colour temperature of the light that fell on the subject, the number you selected on the camera is just a memo to remind you of what you thought the temperature was when you took it. It is up to the photographer to adjust that temperature in software to give whatever colouration they feel is appropriate.
Therefore, to concur with Mark, it is evident that there isn’t a camera in the world, producing RAW files, that speaks of reality.
Your idea of “reality” simply doesn’t exist. And yet, the world’s greatest photographers create photographs every day, without even thinking much less worrying, about some obsessional concept of reality.
The only folks that seem to be so nit-picky are press photographers, whose images are printed at such low resolution on toilet paper that they aren’t worth the effort; and those folks who are seeking approval from their peers by entering competitions, judged by folks who seem to have forgotten what makes a good phot, in favour of some formulaic image that might please this or that judge.
So, what if I take a single large photo, tear it up and reassemble the pieces without aligning them perfectly?
Nope. That won’t do. I want a single to photo to convey how I felt whilst I was at the park - and for longer than 1/500 sec.
I’m giving you the dictionary definition, in English.
If you want to talk about painters, or people who tear photos apart, only to re-assemble them, that’s fine, but I find it pointless to debate. Have it your way. Are the two photos you just posted “photographs” As far as I know, yes, but very long exposures.
All right, givien that rather simple definition of a photograph which you apparently agree to, a multi exposure image using as many as 10 automatically stacked images captured and processed in camera resulting in a single JPG would fit your definition of a photograph. This is functionality many cameras have. Reading the definition you provided, this functionality would meet the definition of a photograph
Additionally a high definition image created from multiple individual images with different exposures, and combined into a single JPEG in camera would also qualify as a photograph.
Some cameras even contain internal software that allows the user to perform post-processing tasks that were previously the pervue of external software programs.
So, based on your simple definition, all, those out of camera jpegs would also be photographs although they probably would not meet Photojournalism standards. Don’t you see how your definition of a photograph based upon limitations imposed upon you as a photojournalist news are no longer relavent?
And since modern cameras provide such a significant amount of automatic post processing in camera which is not much different to post processing performed out of the camera, the definitional lines are blurred even more.
