“The camera cannot lie.”
When photography was in its infancy, this was often said in magazines and elsewhere. But is it true? And what role does processing take in this?
What is purity?
There is this almost purist sort of bent among some photographers, where the general belief is that film is somehow more truthful, and that processing a digital image is somehow more deceitful. Several years ago, in fact, some photographers described images they posted as “SOOC” (straight out of camera), almost as a badge of honor.
But I believe we often forget that many photographers sent their film to a lab, where a technician made decisions about exposure, color and artistry for them.
I believe we also forget that photographing “SOOC” simply means that the camera makes processing decisions for them and bakes them into a JPEG.
And I believe we forget that film photographers often manipulated a negative quite a bit.
“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.” – Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams would spend as long as eight hours in the darkroom on a single image. Dodging, burning … what he did was rather complicated, and often involved very specific notes and intent.
HDR
Then there’s HDR. High Dynamic Range. Most people associate this with a program like Photoshop. And many first attempts were garish, often overdone for a grungy effect. But when was the first HDR?
1857. That is the first known attempt that I know of, long before Photoshop, Windows 10 or USB cables. This was a photograph by pioneering French photographer Gustave Le Gray. He combined two negatives — one exposed for the sky, the other for the sea.
Processing
Is eight hours of processing negatives “bad?” Is HDR “bad?”
In night photography, processing surely has become more complicated. A lot of the processing is done in an effort to minimize noise and bring out stars. Is this sort of processing bad?
Purity and realism are moving targets. If spending eight hours in a darkroom, using HDR techniques or reducing noise makes things look or feel more like the actual experience, does this make processing “bad?”
What is realism in photography?
Is spending eight hours in a darkroom to dodge and burn an image any more unrealistic than using a fisheye lens to warp a scene unnaturally?
Is HDR any more unrealistic than “freezing” a waterfall at 1/1000 of a second so we can see the individual droplets of water, something that does not look or feel like the actual experience?
Is reducing noise in a dark photograph any more unrealistic than photographing a street scene for a split second in a grainy black and white image?
Genres like photojournalism or sports photography aside, should the goal of photography even be to make an image look or feel like the actual experience?
What do you think? I’ll leave you with this quote to give you some food for thought.
“A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.” ― John Berger
Film or a sensor are the equivalent of a blank canvas a painter might use to create a painting or the paper a watercolorist might use. We had light to film or a sensor, manipulate it to our taste, then transfer it to paper, metal, glass, or other substrate as our art. Should a painter apply paint to a canvas? A pencil artist draw on paper? Or is the film or sensor somehow sacrosanct while paper and canvas aren’t? Once the SOOC folks transfer the sensor data from the media card to anything else—web, print, or whatever—they’re already processing it… Read more »
Yes. And I really do think we underestimate how much a skilled photographer could manipulate film. If Ansel Adams is spending eight hours on a single photo in the darkroom, well, something is being changed! If someone is using two negatives and multing them together as early as the 1850s, you can guarantee that some fancy stuff was happening. But even if we took, say, a roll of 35mm film to the lab, they were essentially making processing, and therefore, aesthetic and color decisions for us. And with the camera, if we photograph in JPG, well, the camera has made… Read more »
It’s not cheating at all IMHO. It’s all part of the process. Understanding your limits and how creative you want to get once the RAW file is loaded into the computer program sets the tone for your own creation. Some people go way overboard and some manage their settings to create the mood they want from the photograph. I use a camera because I can’t paint what I want to see and feel. With the multitude of software programs available now, I can get as creative as I want. And it’s fun….. Not all of my “art” is perceived the… Read more »
Agreed. I think we all have our own line that draw in the sand, our own comfort level. I just want people to be honest if they do composites or combine different elements, but otherwise, it’s all good.
Every so often I will look at an image in post and say wow, its perfect just the way it is. But that does not happen very often. Most of my landscape photos are edited quite a bit. It happens to be my style, the way I shoot, my artistic license if you will. The various editing programs I use are my darkroom. I can spend hours editing an image. One would be hard pressed to look at any magazine and find a photo that has not had post processing.
Good point. Just about any magazine or book photo will have needed processing, including sports and photojournalism.
Out of curiosity, if you are processing a photo for several hours, what are you typically doing?
If you use raw, and you should, processing the raw image is necessary to showcase your vision. Our hardware is limited compared to our eyes and mind and the software we process with bring out the details we imagined! HDR shooting and processing allows a dynamic range closer to what we see, focus stacking gives us the depth we see with, and blending two (or more) images allow the great night images we now photograph. This is all just a modern version of the different zone systems, custom chemical processing, and printing magic that the film photographers of the 20th… Read more »
Really great points, including the necessity to process a RAW file and processing an image so that it more emulates what our eyes see.
And yeah, film photographers developed quite a few techniques that we use today, and processed photos far more than many give them credit for!