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Photoshopped VS Not

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Mnementh:

--- Quote from: Anyways on 22 Oct 2007, 23:08 ---Daniel, are you just as impressed by every picture where people have been dragging the handles in B/W with no thought behind it whatsoever?

--- End quote ---

Black and White failed to impress me long before Photoshop came along.  There are a lot of kids out there who think all you need to do to create art was shoot with Tri-X.


--- Quote from: Anyways on 22 Oct 2007, 23:08 ---Let's imagine the aforementioned architect: He was the first to build a pyramid. A few days after his work was completed, someone invents a way of making them - say, a insta-grow, add-one-drop-of-water pyramid - so absolutely everyone that had access to the materials could build one, without any effort at all. Ten thousand pyraminds of the exact same kind popped up all over the world. Would you be equally impressed when you saw a pyramid built with the new method? Instead of going "goddamn, you built that?" the way you did when you saw the original pyramid, wouldn't you be going "Oh. You added a drop of water, just like everyone else."? I know I would. I'm not saying you have to be a creative genius who knows his trade inside-out to be a good photographer, I'm just saying it's not as impressive when what you've done has been done thousands of times before, and you didn't actually know what the fuck you were doing when you were editing it.
--- End quote ---

You're vastly overstating the skill it takes in the darkroom or underestimating the skill it takes in photoshop (probably the later) to alter a photograph in a decent fashion.  It's pretentious and insulting.


--- Quote from: Anyways on 22 Oct 2007, 23:08 ---As for tampering with images: If you can find one single professional photographer that doesn't edit his pictures in some way, post-photoshop transition, I'd love to see those pics. I've not seen any the four years I've been interested in photography. I'm not talking adding elements or things like that, just tuning contrasts, black/white-transition, levels adjustments.

--- End quote ---

You completely missed my point.  I wasn't saying no one tampers, I was saying that everyone has been tampering a lot longer than you think.  I'm not sure what relevance the fact that you've been shooting for four years has, but if we're going to play that game, in the fifteen years I've been shooting I've never met anyone who hasn't done some sort of fine tuning in the lab.  I fail to see your point.

Lines:
This is my deal with photoshop - for those of us (including me) who have no idea whatsoever about how to go about developing film (never had time to take a photography class), photoshop is a useful tool. I am so much more impressed by people who can make manipulations in a darkroom (Jerry Uelsmann is one of my favorite photographers who is a perfect example of this), but I am well aware of the skill it takes to use photoshop as I've been using it for the past few years. To make an image not look like it's been manipulated on the computer takes quite a bit of skill. The processes are just different. One of the reasons I respect traditional photography more is because I can't do it. (That's not the only reason, but it's one of them.) However, I do know the skill levels to take both kinds of photographs requires skill. People using photoshop are basically doing the same thing as people in a darkroom - you have a raw image and you "develop" it to the way you see fit, editing contrast, saturation, etc. One just happens to involve film and chemicals and the other jpegs and a computer. The ability to manipulate photographs is still there, it has just progresed further with technology, just everything to do with photography (and every other art form) has since it came about.

Lines:
If you don't know the first thing about darkrooms then I don't really see your point. I don't see why a photo that is edited slightly on a computer has to be valued less than a photo edited with chemicals. If you get a completely traditional photographer together with a completely digital photographer, I'm sure both would be interested in how the other comes about getting their images. It's like debating whether painting with natural or synthetic paint is superior to the other. Maybe one has better color, but the other certainly give more variety.

Lines:
So it's the journey to the end result that interests you. Makes more sense now, thanks. 

If you were to see a photograph that you thought was absolutely magnificent, but you didn't know what process it was, how would you look at it then? Say the photographer was there and you talked to them about how they came about the image, film or digital, would that change your opinion of it? If beforehand you thought it was tradtional, but it was digital, would you value it less and vice versa. Just curious.

Scandanavian War Machine:
why can't you just judge photos by their merit alone and never even bother finding out how it was made? if i see a great photo; i like it because it's good. i'm not interested in how it got that way. good=good, no matter what.

i shoot manually on a 35mm and digitally so maybe i'm just seeing both sides of the issue and am somehow biased towards neutrality. i don't know. i believe i made my point, anyway.

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