I’m about to reveal a secret. But first the science.
Cameras are, in essence, very simple machines. There’s a hole at the front which lets light in, a barrier in the middle which raises on command and a receptor at the back which registers the image. Everything else is just stuff to make things easier and give the user control over the outcome but even this pretty much boils down to two thing: changing the size of the hole (aperture) and varying the amount of time the barrier is raised for (shutter speed).
The most important part of a camera is not the body. It’s the lens and the receptor. A fucked lens and shite film will not give you a good photo (traditionally speaking, of course) no matter how expensive your camera body is. It’s all about how the light gets in and what you’ve got recording it.
All film is not created equal. They all use different chemicals which react to the light in different ways, be it subdued tone or saturated colours. This is why film photographers pay more for their rolls than the average snapper of yesteryear – they’re after a certain effect.
With your modern day digital camera the operation is nearly identical but the film is replaced with a sensor. This, when exposed to the light, records the light and creates a binary file which, when interpreted by a computer program, produces the image.
All the digital sensors in all the digital cameras pretty much produce the same sort of photo. Yes some are more crisp and detailed than others (and don’t forget about the lens) but the basic colour balance, assuming the computer in the camera hasn’t adjusted it, will be the same.
So when you see a lovely photo on Flickr with rich deep colours that looks somewhat unreal yet still beautiful it wasn’t the camera that produced that. Either the subject was lit in a certain way or the effect, which previously would have been the result of the film used, was probably done in Photoshop*. That’s the secret.
This is one of the reasons folk come to the conclusion that digital photography is “boring” compared to film. All their photos look the same – very crisp and perfect replications of reality with no depth or soul. And they’re right – a digital camera on its own will produce the same sort of photo again and again because it’s designed to do that, automatically correcting the exposure and white balance to preset levels. It soon gets very boring.
What’s odd is how very few photographers admit to tweaking their digital photos in Photoshop and if they do it comes over as an admission of failure. There’s this notion that the only pure photo is one that came out of the camera fully formed while that can be true for film it’s a fallacy for digital.
Think about it. The chemical reaction that occurs on film (not to mention what happens in the dark room) is analogous to processing a digital image in Photoshop. If you don’t do the latter you’re missing out a step which is why your photos are boring.
(Important note: This is not to say every photo has to be messed around with. Judging that the photo doesn’t need any more work is the same as working on it.)
So it’s somewhat misleading that Flickr shows what camera was used on the sidebar of each photo page. Other than handling issues (which are important for getting a steady shot and twiddling the settings in a timely manner) the meat of the work is done by the lighting, the lens and in Photoshop. But none of these are recorded in the EXIF data which Flickr takes this information from so everyone thinks the Nikon D70s or Cannon 350D or whatever is responsible for the beautiful colours. But it’s not. It’s all done in Photoshop.
And that, I think, is a not a problem.
* or some other image editing software.
All sensors are not equal. Your D70 will have a huge sensor compared to a pocket digicam. So even if the two cameras have the same resolution, because the sensor is smaller on the digicam, there will be increased interference or noise on the image, caused by the smaller sensor.
I tweak every one of my photos in photoshop. I run filters over them, sometimes I adjust the exposure. And I crop them.
I wonder if the idea that photos must be just as the photographer takes them is a product of the last few decades of colour photography? Not many people process their own colour photos, but when black and white was all that was available, plenty (most?) photographers did their own developing and printing. Half the art of B&W photography is in the darkroom, though the potential for altering photos might seem limited compared to photoshop, etc., it can make all the difference.
I point and click and hope for the best.
Which kind of sums up my whole attitude.
So far it’s got me through life ok.
Just about…
Matt B
That disclaimer isn’t as persuasive as you might have intended. You can say that an unmodified photo can be as good as a modified one, and I’m glad to hear it. But, when your closing line is ‘it’s all done in Photoshop’, I am left thinking you are not a fan of raw photos.
Maybe I missed something, but my response is that there are plenty of instances where modifying a photo in any way is degrading it. Here’s an example. It’s an action shot of someone’s birthday party, taken with a tripod in the light of some sparklers. It is essentially a found object. I cannot justify changing the tone, the colouration, any of that stuff. Cropping, maybe, but there’s no need for it.
It’s not a brilliant photo, but a matter of luck, and because it was luck, I don’t see any justification for messing with it. Some photos are like that.
I also think there’s summat to be said for finding the amazing tones, textures, and so forth. You probably have a more nuanced eye than I, and may not be impressed by things I like, but I find plenty of nuance in raw photos. I think those qualities can be sought, and found.
* if the photo isn’t visible, the following comment will have a link.
I agree with Karen, having cut my teeth on b&w photography with film in the darkroom, etc. Dodging and burning an enlargement is also a classic Photoshop process so there really is not a lot of difference between processing film to print and processing digital to print/Flickr.
The truth is that digital processing is many times more sophisticated. You have an “undo” option for a start! It is also much more easily abused and therein lies the rub. Purists (not that they are necessarily pure) will abhor anything that has the slightest hint of Photoshop and of course they have lots of nasty things to say about HDR (a technique that has real advantages but can also be abused). Adherents of excessive Photoshopping will argue that they are using artistic license, and so they are. As always, there is a middle road.
Perhaps the EXIF file should also contain all the steps used during modification of the image? I think not. In fact I am not sure any information from the EXIF file should be viewed by anyone other than the photographer. The image should speak for itself.
Another thought, prompted by “dp”, is that in the digital realm you can save changes to an image as a separate file, thereby retaining the original and having the opportunity to experiment.
I’m coming back to this from a different direction. The other way of looking at photography is to consider the huge differences that time of day, weather conditions, lighting effects, etc. can make on a composition. I find this more fascinating (but a lot more time consuming) than all the post-processing in the world. You still need the basic equipment but the right timing can easily eliminate a lot of the post-processing.
Paul, you’re right about the multiple copy thing – and that’s exactly what I do whenever I start to manipulate an image. So yes, I could fiddle around with these ‘found’ scenes – but my aesthetic preference is to leave them as is. Part of that is about wanting people to think ‘Hey, I could do that!’ without worrying if they’ve got the right gear, technical know-how, and so forth.
What’s that, Matt? You just point and click and hope for the best? (I just drifted off to your photostream to find a shot that disputed that … and OK, you are at the moment all about siezing the moments, though that’s hardly a trivial skill) anyway, what was I going to say …
Oh yes, reality — well, I sometimes tweak, but because a lot of what I do is as much about the capabilities of the camera (digital, film, whatever) as the subject, it would be defeating the object to spend hours smoothing and tweaking everything post-shot. But there’s no morality about it — part of my job is rescuing photos — if you need a photo of or for something specific, you work with what you have. I can work wonders, but usually (for my own stuff), I’ll just discard a photo with problems, often before it even gets off my camera. Of course, sometimes I’m after the problems …
TBH a lot of my interest in keeping post to a minimum is about saving time – … it saves me having to bloat out my picture folders with pre and post files, too. Not to say that I don’t spend a lot of time working on an occasional image but at some point there comes a boundary, where the photograph stops, becomes an artwork that has used a photograph as raw material.
Jeremy: You’ve got your Matt B’s mixed up, though it’s quite understandable and they are both cartoonists. The above is Matt Broersma, not Brooker, and his Flickr stream is here.
Matt, if you’d linked to your site Jeremy wouldn’t have gotten confused. Now apologise and learn from your error young man.
The rest of you I’ll deal with later.
Pete, you mistook me for a cartoonist.
Matt B(adham) gatecrashing a serious conversation and feeling slightly ashamed after the fact for adding nothing to that conversation.
I’m going to slink off to the buffet table and steal some finger food. Last time I try and join in a civilised discussion. ;o)
(For what it’s worth though, I do point and click and hope for the best)
To my shame I have no flicker stream or website to link to.
(There’s a lot of shame in this post)
Matt B (the other, other one)
Nice to be mistaken for Matt B and Matt B though. Both very talented fellows.
Matt B 3
I doctor just about every photo I ‘release’ (Flickr basically). I’m not a photographer of any standing, but whilst I can usually pick a good ‘view’, getting the lighting, exposure blah blah… correct I’ve still to master.
So I edit the photos I take. Sometimes just a crop but more often than not I adjust contrast and other bits and bobs.
Does that make my photos LESS than others? Not for me. But then I’m worried ONLY about the final outcome. Not the process of how it took to get there. I think that’s where a lot of the more serious photographers get a little… ohh you know.. all “hobbyist” about this.
I hope that doesn’t come across as insulting, it’s not meant to be. But I do think that poo-pooing a photo because it has been adjusted is missing the point. You either like the image or not. HOW that image came about isn’t really the point? Or is it?
Good post, thanks for this. I recently have been experiencing a lot of lack of confidence in myself because my photos don’t look great straight out of the camera, but then I often like them after photoshop, this to me seemed like cheating a bit. But then, 90% of colour film photographers (pros) don’t process their own film, the lab makes a lot of decisions for them, and truth be told, a computer in the lab probably makes a lot of decisions for them.
Good point about digicams trying to make everything look similar, I’ll remember that next time! I’m glad I found this blog.
Was Michaelangelo cheating when he used assistants to fill in the boring bits of frescos? Was Vermeer cheating when he used a camera obscura (allegedly)? Bringing things more up to date, is Damien Hirst cheating when he has an idea and pays someone else to make a giant copy of an anatomical model? Is Tracy Emin cheating when she uses assistants to sew her textile pieces?
Looking at it from another point of view, even the efforts of impressionists and super-realists to capture reality (in their very different ways) go through a pair of eyes (or at least one) a brain and a hand, turning into oily pigment on canvas.
I’m not comparing us with the great artists of course, but any piece of art work has a combination of outside and internal influences, and goes though a process of change. When you take a photograph, it isn’t that object or view you capture, it’s an image, and the instant you’ve done that it is a completely separate thing from that which caught your eye in the first place. Whether you present it just as it is, or alter it through processing or computer manipulation, it is already altered. It seems to me fair to say how the image is arrived at, if it is exhibited, the same way that an artist might say ‘mixed media’ rather than ‘watercolour’.
This is all assuming that photography is art!
Thanks for the interesting comments.
Interesting topic. A friend of mine sent me some samples from an interview with Nick Knight and i think they have some relevance here.
“Digital Imaging, has released photography from its obligation to be truthful”
“The digital revolution in photography is leading us into a new medium,
exceedingly exciting, but one that we shouldn’t call photography at all.It
comes with its own distribution system, that of internet and screens…it hasn’t
been named yet because it hasn’t been properly defined yet.”
Not saying that this is my personal opinion but i thought it might interest you peeps.
Oh, I think digital photography is still photography with no need for new definitions. Nick Knight possibly knows nothing about working in a darkroom!
I thought photographs were meant to be pleasing. They don’t now, and never have, borne much relation to visual reality. Look at Technicolor, for starters.
My latest pocket digital makes blue skies look absolutely gorgeous. Water, too. But magazines have been doing that for decades with their glossies, and nobody cried “fake”. I’m not sure I get the point you’re making. None of it is “real”.
What you’re REALLY looking at when you view a computer screen is a matrix of coloured dots firing briefly but so quickly as to fool your brain that it’s seeing a “still picture”. Could hardly be more unreal, to be honest.
The “correct” picture is the one that looks nicest.
Aaargh! Too many Matts! I’ll have to come up with a numbering system, like the one I use for neiblings …
My latest upload had a photo I did a quantity of post on to fix overexposure and depth of field problems:
… and the reason was that I was using the photo to tell a story, and I only had the one photo to call on. Nice greens though; definitely not a difficult rescue job.
One more thing! Your digital’s automatic adjusters are just as flummoxable as the old film camera’s ones, and different brands and models (especially around the £50-200) range have their own quirks and effects. While it’s true that the storage medium is equal (unlike the multiplicity of types of film!) the colour and other variations are still there — they’ve just been pushed into the camera’s colour processing, where the company has been forced to make decisions about what to optimise.
I quite like the fact that my little point-and-click digital is namechecked in the sidebar. It’s the co-author of what’s been going on, after all.
Argh! No, I think this is utter bollocks, sorry. Not that you’re necessarily wrong of course, it’s that the amateur photography industry marketeers are so good at persuading us that we need more pixels and more knobs to twiddle to get more magical effects, white balance adjustment, dof previews blah de blah, and NOW you’re telling us that we all need photoshop to produce a decent image? Bollocks, and bollocks again I say. That makes the average dSLR + s/w turn in at around £1500, doesn’t it? Plus lenses, plus stuff like tripods, memory cards, all that.
Just thinking about how many decent shots I can produce on 35mm film for that money. But that’s an aside.
If you personally must photoshop absolutely everything, fair enough, but don’t tell people that it’s an inevitable road to go down. If we stop listening to people like Paul who’ve been taking photos for decades, and learn from them about light, about shooting say in the early mornings, about basic composition, about taking one’s time over each individual frame, instead of firing off 20 and hoping to make the best of one of them later on. That’s why you get bored, that’s why you’re getting dissatisfied. The camera stuff all done without enough thought.
It takes time to develop a good eye for a photograph. That’s something you can’t get in photoshop, however much money you’ve spent on your fancy camera.
As an amateur who isn’t interested in the techie stuff, I like the fact that I can fire off about 20 shots and then cherry-pick from them later.
BugMatt
I do that too, most serious photographers do, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that the digital medium makes the whole process more disposable. Chosing from 20 shots taken at the right time, and with care for the composition and subject matter is a whole different thing to firing a few off in the hope that you can add in yesterday’s sky or wipe out that stray bit of passer by later on. Yes, go ahead and do it, but when people say that is inevitable, that you must post-process absolutely everything to get a decent photo, something is going wrong somewhere.
I missed a line out up there, probably quite crucial, but I’m f’ked if I know what was in it.
Pete wrote:
>“automatically correcting the exposure and white balance to preset levels.”
You probably know this by now, but you can alter the white balance setting in your camera by pointing it at something say, blue or red, and telling it that’s the grey the exposure point goes looking for. Try it. :) You can also set saturation and sharpness levels in the camera. These settings are supposed to mimic the settings a scanner can produce when scanning film. Many if not most minilab scanners ramp up the saturation and sharpening, you can’t blame them if people like it. I’ve had lots of digital files of film back from tha lab that have been distorted like that. It’s tempting for the lab to do it, makes for that popular oversaturated look so prevalent in that McDonalds of Flickr, the Explore pages. These days it’s almost impossible to get images that haven’t been digitally altered in some way unless you process your own, which is a damn fine idea anyway. :)
Just a suggestion – John Hedgecoe’s classic books on photography are worth a second look in this digital age. A few years ago I talked to several people who quite unnecessarily slagged Hedgecoe’s books – possibly because he is so “old school”.
Pete mentions Flickr’s Explore pages. Yes, I agree, there’s something very artificial about the colors in this selection that I can only assume is computer picked in some way (perhaps by checking the saturation level?) A lot of HDR images fall into the same category, being larger than life. That’s not to say they are in any way inferior but they do conform to what people are conditioned to think is good rather than what people actually believe is good.
Brenda’s comments are valuable if only to remind us that it is not the equipment or the software that makes the photo but the eye of the photographer. Cheap plastic lenses (Lomo) with chronic aberration and distortion can, in the right hands, take beautiful photographs. Expensive lenses on high end digital bodies can take crappy images that no end of Photoshopping will save.
One of the best ways to learn about photography is in an exhibition of photographs. What becomes clear is that it is not necessarily the technical excellence that makes photographs great but the moment, the composiiton, the luck, the persistence, the shear gall of it all!