Articles about digital photo manipulation and ethics
July 4, 2013 2:58 PM Subscribe
Hi, I am curious about how photographers view the ethics of digital manipulation. Do you know any articles or discussions where I could learn more? I'm interested in a variety of views from photographers in different fields.
Thanks!
Dispose magazine is committed to publishing only photos from cheap, disposable film cameras, as a means of getting back to the ethics of composition-in-viewfinder and recognition of technical and lighting issues by the photographer at time of exposure. Very interesing Wired article about this.
posted by paulsc at 3:43 PM on July 4, 2013
posted by paulsc at 3:43 PM on July 4, 2013
There are two different modes of thought.
One, photojournalism. In this mode of thought, you can have a range of opinions. At one end is National Geographic, which pretty much doesn't allow any manipulation outside the camera--digital is only a logistical convenience. This is seen in the judging of the fire photo from a couple years ago; the photographer underexposed on purpose to account for the way digital works with the express intention of overdeveloping, so to speak, after the fact. The judges threw the photo out, despite this being a technique that has film analogues. At the other end of the photo-j mode of thought are people like that photographer, where as long as pixels aren't moved around or composited, fair's fair. (in this case, it's helpful to understand the nature of digital capture. Each pixel is a bucket of light. Once it's full, it's full, and there's no way to know how much extra spilled out. So you underexpose so the buckets don't fill up, and add to the buckets after the fact to get the image right.)
Just like the NG extreme, this lassez-faire extreme has issues. The standard of "don't move the pixels", i.e. global edits only, grants latitude which can lead to surprising results. With one tweak of a curve in Photoshop, I can make a red car green; that's pretty obviously beyond the ideal of photojournalism, but why? Unfortunately, the standard for what constitutes too much editing in a journalism context seems to be headed toward the famous Supreme Court definition of pornography.
Outside journalism, i.e. photography as art, there's an even wider range of opinions. I see artists claiming "no manipulation" but that's bullshit - no one's from-the-camera jpegs are getting printed straight; at the very least there are algorithms applied by the printer's raster image processor. If you're shooting jpegs, the camera is using which ever formulas you tell it to; if you're shooting RAW the pictures straight out of the camera are dull as shit. You clean dust off otherwise smooth areas of a photo - is that "manipulation"?
Some people use a standard (and this holds in the journalism mode, too) of "if it could be done in the chemical darkroom, it's ok." Well, photographers in the 1880s kept a series of fluffy-cloud photos to insert in their blown-out skies. Ansel Adams was a master of the print - but he dodged, burned, overdeveloped, all kinds of things. There's some truly freaky stuff you could do by cutting open Polaroids, or developing one kind of film in another kind's chemistry. Point being, that's not much of a standard.
Finally, there's a true, anything-goes philosophy. I mean, after all, it's art, so why must it conform to journalism standards of any kind? I take photographs for my own enjoyment (and hopefully, soon, to sell at art fairs); I've been known to stitch photos together to make panoramas, blend exposures to get a wider range of tonalities than could be captured in one release of the shutter, and play with the color temperature of a photo to get the look that feels right. Of course that leaf may not have been, if measured by a color photometer, *that* green. My personal standard is that the photo must accurately reflect my own, internal emotional state when I took the photo.
--
When I see super-HDRed photos, I personally am turned off; there are ways to compress the dynamic range and reflect the color variation without having that gritty, EXTREME(tm) look. Actually being able to see detail in the shadows and highlights is useful in some cases to portray the subject. But I've tempered my distaste by reminding myself that, hey, maybe the photographer really is DUFFMAN! and the picture is accurately reflecting his internal state. /hamburger
posted by notsnot at 4:52 PM on July 4, 2013 [4 favorites]
One, photojournalism. In this mode of thought, you can have a range of opinions. At one end is National Geographic, which pretty much doesn't allow any manipulation outside the camera--digital is only a logistical convenience. This is seen in the judging of the fire photo from a couple years ago; the photographer underexposed on purpose to account for the way digital works with the express intention of overdeveloping, so to speak, after the fact. The judges threw the photo out, despite this being a technique that has film analogues. At the other end of the photo-j mode of thought are people like that photographer, where as long as pixels aren't moved around or composited, fair's fair. (in this case, it's helpful to understand the nature of digital capture. Each pixel is a bucket of light. Once it's full, it's full, and there's no way to know how much extra spilled out. So you underexpose so the buckets don't fill up, and add to the buckets after the fact to get the image right.)
Just like the NG extreme, this lassez-faire extreme has issues. The standard of "don't move the pixels", i.e. global edits only, grants latitude which can lead to surprising results. With one tweak of a curve in Photoshop, I can make a red car green; that's pretty obviously beyond the ideal of photojournalism, but why? Unfortunately, the standard for what constitutes too much editing in a journalism context seems to be headed toward the famous Supreme Court definition of pornography.
Outside journalism, i.e. photography as art, there's an even wider range of opinions. I see artists claiming "no manipulation" but that's bullshit - no one's from-the-camera jpegs are getting printed straight; at the very least there are algorithms applied by the printer's raster image processor. If you're shooting jpegs, the camera is using which ever formulas you tell it to; if you're shooting RAW the pictures straight out of the camera are dull as shit. You clean dust off otherwise smooth areas of a photo - is that "manipulation"?
Some people use a standard (and this holds in the journalism mode, too) of "if it could be done in the chemical darkroom, it's ok." Well, photographers in the 1880s kept a series of fluffy-cloud photos to insert in their blown-out skies. Ansel Adams was a master of the print - but he dodged, burned, overdeveloped, all kinds of things. There's some truly freaky stuff you could do by cutting open Polaroids, or developing one kind of film in another kind's chemistry. Point being, that's not much of a standard.
Finally, there's a true, anything-goes philosophy. I mean, after all, it's art, so why must it conform to journalism standards of any kind? I take photographs for my own enjoyment (and hopefully, soon, to sell at art fairs); I've been known to stitch photos together to make panoramas, blend exposures to get a wider range of tonalities than could be captured in one release of the shutter, and play with the color temperature of a photo to get the look that feels right. Of course that leaf may not have been, if measured by a color photometer, *that* green. My personal standard is that the photo must accurately reflect my own, internal emotional state when I took the photo.
--
When I see super-HDRed photos, I personally am turned off; there are ways to compress the dynamic range and reflect the color variation without having that gritty, EXTREME(tm) look. Actually being able to see detail in the shadows and highlights is useful in some cases to portray the subject. But I've tempered my distaste by reminding myself that, hey, maybe the photographer really is DUFFMAN! and the picture is accurately reflecting his internal state. /hamburger
posted by notsnot at 4:52 PM on July 4, 2013 [4 favorites]
For what it's worth, self link to my blog entry about this subject:
What is a Real Photograph? Part 1
What is a Real Photograph? Part 2
posted by The Deej at 5:23 PM on July 4, 2013 [1 favorite]
What is a Real Photograph? Part 1
What is a Real Photograph? Part 2
posted by The Deej at 5:23 PM on July 4, 2013 [1 favorite]
A bit late but I just found this essay. "What is a fake photograph?"
what's a fake photo graph?
Fake is totally arbitrary, it could be adjusting contrast after the fact or right out of the camera but a staged scene, etc.
posted by TheAdamist at 5:39 PM on July 11, 2013
what's a fake photo graph?
Fake is totally arbitrary, it could be adjusting contrast after the fact or right out of the camera but a staged scene, etc.
posted by TheAdamist at 5:39 PM on July 11, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by djb at 3:14 PM on July 4, 2013 [1 favorite]