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Just what is a photograph
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Just what is a photograph
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:52:40 -0000, "ChrisM" wrote: In message , Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower: Years ago, when working in my darkroom, I had a pretty good idea what a photograph was. You shone light on a negative, developed it, put in in an enlarger, shone light on a piece of light-sensitive paper, and developed that. When you got done you had a photograph. You could add elements, dodge, burn, screw with chemicals or make lithos; but in the end it all came down to shining light on a piece of paper and getting a print. Last week I was working on a silhouette. I took a (digital) picture of the person, copied it and used two copies of the same image -- one mirror image of the other -- so they were facing each other. I printed the faces in "white" and the space between them in black. I then used an exacto knife to cut away the white areas leaving me with just the black area. The profile of the faces were preserved in the cut-line. I tried calling what I had left "a photograph" but I in effect, it was more of a negative of the original image. The only think I really had left was a representation of what I had NOT photographed, not what I had photographed. The other thing that I pondered was the fact that the image was not represented in "b&w" or in some tonality but the image was represented physically as to whether there was paper there or not. I all made me start thinking "is this a photograph or not". Just what is a photograph in the age of digital printing. How is a digital image any different than a really pretty Excel document. How much can you manipulate a "photo" before it becomes something else -- and when it becomes something else, what does it become? Have you been smoking something...?? :-) Seriously though, some interesting points raised! If you want to go with the definition of a photograph and not try and really think about what it means when you creatively alter the image, the better definitions usually have something in them about capturing a real scene by some means, whether it's chemically sensitive film or directly converting photons to energy like in a digital sensor. A photograph is a graph (a visual or symbolic representation) of the photons (light) that were captured at a certain place and time. Once you start creatively altering that graph other than to make it more faithfully represent the light that struck the sensor and "look like" what you might have seen with your own eyes at that place and time, it may be art, it may be a picture, it may be an image but it's no longer a photograph. In these days of digital editing, you have to expand that a little bit. So basically, IMHO, the definition I like to use is that if your post processing only does things to an original captured image that could have been done in the physical world at the time the photograph was captured (like applying color filters, distortions that can be created with curved mirrors, fisheye lenses, etc.) and things like sharpening enough to account for lens/sensor softness, fixing bad exposure problems, etc., then you are still working with a photograph. But once your image starts depicting things that could either not have existed in the real world or could not have been photographically captured in the first place, then you are no longer working with a photograph. Steve |
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Just what is a photograph
mianileng wrote:
To me and to some others, a photograph is a picture taken with a camera, reproducing the appearance of the subject as faithfully as possible within reasonable limits. This does not preclude the use of *some* amount of processing to make the picture appealing and to enhance technical accuracy, compensating for shortcomings in the camera and exposure errors. But it does exclude a picture that has been excessively manipulated and altered, such as by adding something that was not in the original scene or by gross deliberate distortion of shapes, content, color and light. My personal criterion would be along the lines that it's a photograph if it could always have been better with a better camera/body/lens(*). Otherwise it's just a pretty/interesting picture incidentally made out of a photograph. (*) for some virtual value of better, I am not that addicted to expensive gear, and anyway the relation between picture quality and camera cost is far from linear. -- Bertrand |
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Just what is a photograph
Pat wrote:
On Nov 25, 3:50 pm, Steve wrote: On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:52:40 -0000, "ChrisM" wrote: In message , Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower: Years ago, when working in my darkroom, I had a pretty good idea what a photograph was. You shone light on a negative, developed it, put in in an enlarger, shone light on a piece of light-sensitive paper, and developed that. When you got done you had a photograph. You could add elements, dodge, burn, screw with chemicals or make lithos; but in the end it all came down to shining light on a piece of paper and getting a print. Last week I was working on a silhouette. I took a (digital) picture of the person, copied it and used two copies of the same image -- one mirror image of the other -- so they were facing each other. I printed the faces in "white" and the space between them in black. I then used an exacto knife to cut away the white areas leaving me with just the black area. The profile of the faces were preserved in the cut-line. I tried calling what I had left "a photograph" but I in effect, it was more of a negative of the original image. The only think I really had left was a representation of what I had NOT photographed, not what I had photographed. The other thing that I pondered was the fact that the image was not represented in "b&w" or in some tonality but the image was represented physically as to whether there was paper there or not. I all made me start thinking "is this a photograph or not". Just what is a photograph in the age of digital printing. How is a digital image any different than a really pretty Excel document. How much can you manipulate a "photo" before it becomes something else -- and when it becomes something else, what does it become? Have you been smoking something...?? :-) Seriously though, some interesting points raised! If you want to go with the definition of a photograph and not try and really think about what it means when you creatively alter the image, the better definitions usually have something in them about capturing a real scene by some means, whether it's chemically sensitive film or directly converting photons to energy like in a digital sensor. A photograph is a graph (a visual or symbolic representation) of the photons (light) that were captured at a certain place and time. Once you start creatively altering that graph other than to make it more faithfully represent the light that struck the sensor and "look like" what you might have seen with your own eyes at that place and time, it may be art, it may be a picture, it may be an image but it's no longer a photograph. I think that is pretty much spot on. But "back in the day", no one though that airbrushing a photo made it less of a photo. If you remove a pimple or "unblink" an eye (and no one can tell the difference), then is it a photo? To some extend, touch ups might make some photos look MORE realistic. Yes, but that falls into the category "look(ing) like what you might have seen with your own eyes". Although I would change that to "looking like what you perceived", given how much brainwork there is involved in what we 'see'. I have sometimes retouched portraits where the person was unlucky enough to have a pimple or other temporary condition at the moment of the portrait. To me that definitely still stands as a photograph. In these days of digital editing, you have to expand that a little bit. So basically, IMHO, the definition I like to use is that if your post processing only does things to an original captured image that could have been done in the physical world at the time the photograph was captured (like applying color filters, distortions that can be created with curved mirrors, fisheye lenses, etc.) and things like sharpening enough to account for lens/sensor softness, fixing bad exposure problems, etc., then you are still working with a photograph. But once your image starts depicting things that could either not have existed in the real world or could not have been photographically captured in the first place, then you are no longer working with a photograph. Steve Again, I pretty much agree. I don't think that the definition is very important except in one way - when there is *purposeful* deceit. In competitions, or when describing an image, the *process* is (or may be) important, so if, eg you pasted a silhouetted bird into a sunset rather than waiting for a real one.. you need to declare that. Same with replaced skies, etc. But, then, what if you just digitally removed a piece of rubbish from a scene (it might have been behind a fence and inaccessible..). Do you need to declare *that*, and under what circumstances? It's all very tricky. As an aside, I must confess I get some enjoyment out of busting pretenders - there have a been a few notable examples on sites like Photosig where a 'photographer' falsely described the 'reality' of an image and then got busted.. (Eg a 'Joshua Tree' that miraculously appeared in two different locations.. (O |
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Just what is a photograph
On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:48:30 +1000, Mark Thomas wrote: Again, I pretty much agree. I don't think that the definition is very important except in one way - when there is *purposeful* deceit. In competitions, or when describing an image, the *process* is (or may be) important, so if, eg you pasted a silhouetted bird into a sunset rather than waiting for a real one.. you need to declare that. Same with replaced skies, etc. But, then, what if you just digitally removed a piece of rubbish from a scene (it might have been behind a fence and inaccessible..). Do you need to declare *that*, and under what circumstances? It's all very tricky. For the purposes of competition, things should be declared that might not necessarily matter when discussing whether something is a photograph not. For instance, if you digitally removed something that you could have removed in the real world, but didn't because it's behind a fence and is inaccessible and did it in such a way that it looks like it was never there in the first place I'd still consider that a photograph. But it should be declared for a competition. I have a wonderful picture of an old steam engine pulling away from a station but there are overhead wires that detract from the image. I could have cut them down but that would land me in some trouble. So I removed them digitally and I still consider it a photograph, probably because the alterations were so minor. But on the other hand, when you do something like superimpose a full moon on a scene where the moon is obviously several times larger than it would have been if it were captured as it would appear in real life, then that's no longer a photograph. Superimposing a bird on a sunset is definitely a gray area though. I would more than likely consider that not to be a photograph because, instead of working with what you captured, you're adding something that wasn't there. But as with anything that's in a gray area, I could be convinced otherwise. As an aside, I must confess I get some enjoyment out of busting pretenders - there have a been a few notable examples on sites like Photosig where a 'photographer' falsely described the 'reality' of an image and then got busted.. (Eg a 'Joshua Tree' that miraculously appeared in two different locations.. (O Or recently and famously, the pictures of the Iranian missile test that were altered by copying and pasting missiles that worked and sections of their smoke trails over the duds. Steve |
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Just what is a photograph
"mianileng" wrote in message ... "ChrisM" wrote in message Snipped To me and to some others, a photograph is a picture taken with a camera, Edited Out The above is a fair definition. Everything that was done in the original post could just as easily have been done in a darkroom. Don't forget that using semi transparent negatives never were the only way of making prints. Roy G |
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Just what is a photograph
"Steve" wrote in message ... On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:52:40 -0000, "ChrisM" wrote: In message , Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower: Years ago, when working in my darkroom, I had a pretty good idea what a photograph was. You shone light on a negative, developed it, put in in an enlarger, shone light on a piece of light-sensitive paper, and developed that. When you got done you had a photograph. You could add elements, dodge, burn, screw with chemicals or make lithos; but in the end it all came down to shining light on a piece of paper and getting a print. Last week I was working on a silhouette. I took a (digital) picture of the person, copied it and used two copies of the same image -- one mirror image of the other -- so they were facing each other. I printed the faces in "white" and the space between them in black. I then used an exacto knife to cut away the white areas leaving me with just the black area. The profile of the faces were preserved in the cut-line. I tried calling what I had left "a photograph" but I in effect, it was more of a negative of the original image. The only think I really had left was a representation of what I had NOT photographed, not what I had photographed. The other thing that I pondered was the fact that the image was not represented in "b&w" or in some tonality but the image was represented physically as to whether there was paper there or not. I all made me start thinking "is this a photograph or not". Just what is a photograph in the age of digital printing. How is a digital image any different than a really pretty Excel document. How much can you manipulate a "photo" before it becomes something else -- and when it becomes something else, what does it become? Have you been smoking something...?? :-) Seriously though, some interesting points raised! If you want to go with the definition of a photograph and not try and really think about what it means when you creatively alter the image, the better definitions usually have something in them about capturing a real scene by some means, whether it's chemically sensitive film or directly converting photons to energy like in a digital sensor. A photograph is a graph (a visual or symbolic representation) of the photons (light) that were captured at a certain place and time. Once you start creatively altering that graph other than to make it more faithfully represent the light that struck the sensor and "look like" what you might have seen with your own eyes at that place and time, it may be art, it may be a picture, it may be an image but it's no longer a photograph. In these days of digital editing, you have to expand that a little bit. So basically, IMHO, the definition I like to use is that if your post processing only does things to an original captured image that could have been done in the physical world at the time the photograph was captured (like applying color filters, distortions that can be created with curved mirrors, fisheye lenses, etc.) and things like sharpening enough to account for lens/sensor softness, fixing bad exposure problems, etc., then you are still working with a photograph. But once your image starts depicting things that could either not have existed in the real world or could not have been photographically captured in the first place, then you are no longer working with a photograph. Steve Which means that applying selective tones to the print via waterproof masks, or combining images from several negatives, or removing unwanted parts using cardboard masks, stops it from being a photograph. What about the old timers, circa 1900, when they had to add skies from bought in plates because their own emulsions were so slow they could not record cloud detail. Get real, if it was taken by a camera it is a photograph. Roy G |
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Just what is a photograph
On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:56:34 -0000, "Roy G" wrote: "Steve" wrote in message .. . On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:52:40 -0000, "ChrisM" wrote: In message , Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower: Years ago, when working in my darkroom, I had a pretty good idea what a photograph was. You shone light on a negative, developed it, put in in an enlarger, shone light on a piece of light-sensitive paper, and developed that. When you got done you had a photograph. You could add elements, dodge, burn, screw with chemicals or make lithos; but in the end it all came down to shining light on a piece of paper and getting a print. Last week I was working on a silhouette. I took a (digital) picture of the person, copied it and used two copies of the same image -- one mirror image of the other -- so they were facing each other. I printed the faces in "white" and the space between them in black. I then used an exacto knife to cut away the white areas leaving me with just the black area. The profile of the faces were preserved in the cut-line. I tried calling what I had left "a photograph" but I in effect, it was more of a negative of the original image. The only think I really had left was a representation of what I had NOT photographed, not what I had photographed. The other thing that I pondered was the fact that the image was not represented in "b&w" or in some tonality but the image was represented physically as to whether there was paper there or not. I all made me start thinking "is this a photograph or not". Just what is a photograph in the age of digital printing. How is a digital image any different than a really pretty Excel document. How much can you manipulate a "photo" before it becomes something else -- and when it becomes something else, what does it become? Have you been smoking something...?? :-) Seriously though, some interesting points raised! If you want to go with the definition of a photograph and not try and really think about what it means when you creatively alter the image, the better definitions usually have something in them about capturing a real scene by some means, whether it's chemically sensitive film or directly converting photons to energy like in a digital sensor. A photograph is a graph (a visual or symbolic representation) of the photons (light) that were captured at a certain place and time. Once you start creatively altering that graph other than to make it more faithfully represent the light that struck the sensor and "look like" what you might have seen with your own eyes at that place and time, it may be art, it may be a picture, it may be an image but it's no longer a photograph. In these days of digital editing, you have to expand that a little bit. So basically, IMHO, the definition I like to use is that if your post processing only does things to an original captured image that could have been done in the physical world at the time the photograph was captured (like applying color filters, distortions that can be created with curved mirrors, fisheye lenses, etc.) and things like sharpening enough to account for lens/sensor softness, fixing bad exposure problems, etc., then you are still working with a photograph. But once your image starts depicting things that could either not have existed in the real world or could not have been photographically captured in the first place, then you are no longer working with a photograph. Steve Which means that applying selective tones to the print via waterproof masks, or combining images from several negatives, or removing unwanted parts using cardboard masks, stops it from being a photograph. What about the old timers, circa 1900, when they had to add skies from bought in plates because their own emulsions were so slow they could not record cloud detail. Well, according to what I wrote above, those would be photographs. Because you'd be using some type of processing to enhance what the camera captured but because of technilogical limitations could not present the image near as well as what you'd see if you were looking at it. Same thing as sharpening or exposure fixing today. Also, removing unwanted parts using cardboard masks is just like digitally removing unwanted things from images today, which would still IMHO be a photograph because you could have always removed them in real life before you shot the picture. Get real, if it was taken by a camera it is a photograph. Well hell, I absolutely agree with that ... as long as the camera is at least trying to faithfully capture the scene. That's true even if you apply the strictest definition of what a photograph is. But once you start playing with things taken by a camera, they may no longer be photographs. You could have 2 images taken by a camera and superimpose them in such a way as to make the result no longer a photograph because it would be impossible to take such an image with a camera. A great example being superimposing a huge moon, several times it's natural size, on a scene. Both the moon picture and the scene could be photographs. But the superimposed result is not. Although it could be a very pleasing image. Steve |
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Just what is a photograph
Pat wrote: On Nov 25, 2:51*pm, "mianileng" wrote: "ChrisM" wrote in message ... In message , Pat Proclaimed from the tallest tower: I wondering what you call a photo that's stright from the camera that has not been touched up. Maybe there needs to be names for a touched and a untouched photo. Look at magazine photos. Are they not photos because they have been manipulated? All such photos are touched up. |
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