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Sorry to burst anyone's bubble but files of today will not outlive film of yesterday.
and the site receives a small commission
It's official... digital is crap...
- Thread starter Pookeyhead
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Firstly I tend to agree what Pookeyhead says, with the following reservations.
He does confuse manipulation with processing, in my opinion. And forgets that in the days of film one used the emulsion that gave one the preferred "look" . As soon as the saturated look of Velvia 50 appeared I'd guess that the majority of landscape photographers switched to it and stayed with it. Now we can get the Velvia look if we want to by processing our images in a particular way; but if we prefer something more subtle we can have that too. Digital is like having a thousand and one film emulsions in the camera at any one time.
He does confuse manipulation with processing, in my opinion. And forgets that in the days of film one used the emulsion that gave one the preferred "look" . As soon as the saturated look of Velvia 50 appeared I'd guess that the majority of landscape photographers switched to it and stayed with it. Now we can get the Velvia look if we want to by processing our images in a particular way; but if we prefer something more subtle we can have that too. Digital is like having a thousand and one film emulsions in the camera at any one time.
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Re: manipulation, and "EVERYONE....ALWAYS.....CHANGES......REALITY".
It's really not that simple. There's changes and changes. You can add vibrance or move the white and the black points to make the most of an image if you want, and I have very little argument with that. But it's change in a very limited way. The image is still intrinsically linked with reality. Where change really matters, in my opinion, is if elements within the image are moved around, or removed completely, or if external elements are added to it. Isn't that what McCullin is objecting to?
Changing skies, anyone?
It's really not that simple. There's changes and changes. You can add vibrance or move the white and the black points to make the most of an image if you want, and I have very little argument with that. But it's change in a very limited way. The image is still intrinsically linked with reality. Where change really matters, in my opinion, is if elements within the image are moved around, or removed completely, or if external elements are added to it. Isn't that what McCullin is objecting to?
Changing skies, anyone?
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Changing skies....yes...
Removing a small seagul from the sky to tidy it up? No....
Enhancing colour channels...WB, curves/levels...depends on how severe....
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Digital has opened photography to the masses, nearly everyone has a 'digital darkroom' in their house or the potential to easily have one compared to film days when you had to get processed at a lab or set up your own.
I can see his point about digital processing taking it beyond the realms of reality as it's easy to make alterations in processing compared to film days. White balance is a great example, with RAW files you can play with it more and sometimes a warmer WB makes the image more appealing. With film that choice was set when you put the film in the camera. There were elements of image manipulation during film days too but less is said about that as image processing is seen to be a 'modern' thing.
One point of processing manipulation I find hard is when people advise the use of cloning or removal of elements of an image. Sometimes taking care during the capture of this image can stop the need of cloning out say a stray twig in a wildlife image. It's the 'fix it later in PP' mentality that is changing photography as it's easier with digital.
I can see his point about digital processing taking it beyond the realms of reality as it's easy to make alterations in processing compared to film days. White balance is a great example, with RAW files you can play with it more and sometimes a warmer WB makes the image more appealing. With film that choice was set when you put the film in the camera. There were elements of image manipulation during film days too but less is said about that as image processing is seen to be a 'modern' thing.
One point of processing manipulation I find hard is when people advise the use of cloning or removal of elements of an image. Sometimes taking care during the capture of this image can stop the need of cloning out say a stray twig in a wildlife image. It's the 'fix it later in PP' mentality that is changing photography as it's easier with digital.
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I can think of at least ten digital photos that I've shown to friends and family and had the usual, "oh that's lovely", reaction. Photos that are really good and I've printed and hung. The trouble is, I know all of them started out looking very ordinary and a couple were downright poor. Underexposed, badly framed, etc. But I 'worked them up' into something that looked good. Today, every time I see them I feel like a fraud.
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...and none of them actually look like film! [emoji3]
Nod
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By extension, NO recreation can match what our eyes see. We don't actually see a still image, it's a dynamic process. As we look around a scene, our eyes naturally adjust the compensate as we shift our centre of attention from highlights to shadows and our brains do more. No monitor or printer can match the gamut our eyes see either.
Kept backed up and updated, they should. I've seen old negatives which are beyond rescue and prints from the '70s and '80s that have fared as badly (long before prints were from digitised files.)
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Even images of war and conflict are made with aesthetics in mind.
Hasn't that always been the case - from Wayne Miller to Eric Ravilious? Isn't that in part why McCullin's works stood outs? (Genuine questions, btw, I'm well aware you know more about this stuff than me).
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Why. You took them and edited them. The end result is what matters.
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Don't know about that with film, but I used to love the technical aspects of editing in the darkroom, dodging, burning, changing the processing.
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Sorry you're wrong because you are concentrating on the medium. Only the image produced is important and as such great images always live on.
MWHCVT
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The amusing thing is I can post some images that are completely SOOC okay they're not as they were shot RAW but literally no sliders were touched it was a case of save as once opened in cameraRAW but these photos are very far from the reality of what they eye would see
I think it's a bit rich to blame digital for the ills of photo manipulation, when most of the manipulation that happens under digital was perfectly possible and practiced or developed if you will in the film era..
I think it's a bit rich to blame digital for the ills of photo manipulation, when most of the manipulation that happens under digital was perfectly possible and practiced or developed if you will in the film era..
Cg_Girl
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That's one thing I'd love to have the chance to do and learn how
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I understand what you're saying. It just doesn't work for me because they feel faked.
An extreme example: I could take a photo of a mountain and a photo of a jet and paste one next to the other and say, "wow, look at this incredible photo of an aircraft zipping past this hillside". It could be a really great final image, and it may not look over the top or faked, but I'll know it's fake, so to me it's worthless.
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It seems obvious that a line has to be drawn between images which accurately capture the reality of the moment when the shutter button was pressed, and those images that have been manipulated. How do we judge the realism of an image? With our eyes. Our eyes which do a phenomenal amount of image processing in the brain before presenting the image we "see". They do so much excellent white balancing that it's taken decades of research to get close to auto white balancing in digital cameras. The brain fills in the blind spot. It concatenates the rapid flickering of numerous saccades and prior expectations to erase the differences between the high resolution and colour vision of the central spot with the grayer much diminished resolution of the rest. It adjusts perspective so that minor perspective distortions are rectified. In high contrast scenes the saccades as the eye scans through dark and light areas are used in a kind of HDR to improve the "as seen" dynamic range.
I could go on, but I hope it's clear that our eyes and brain do something very far from presenting a simple snapshot of a moment to our seeing consciousness. Yet what we judge the realism of a photograph by is comparison with what we "see" after all this concatenation and rectification of multiple images in the brain. But the camera creates its image from one instant shot on a uniform high resolution sensor, and what's more does so with more detail resolution and dynamic range than many of us are capable of seeing. Hence the need in producing the in-camera JPEG image of doing some kind of white balancing, some kind of choice of how to truncate and compress the dynamic range from the sensor, and so on. The camera maker gives the user a variety of modes which adjust the parameters of this internal conversion, such as contrast, saturation, sharpening landscape, portrait, night, sunset, etc.. The camera maker also supplies the user with a RAW file converter which can do exactly the same adjustments to the RAW file as the JPEG converter in the camera used.
So if you're a believer in the image purity and realism of "getting it right in the camera", just using the unprocessed ex-camera JPEG as Reuters seem to have decided to do, what is the logic of accepting the ex-camera JPEG, while denying the exactly equivalent processing done later in computer to produce an identical image? The only possible justification for insisting on the ex-camera JPEG is because it limits the scope for processing to the simple global adjustments that used to be done routinely in the darkroom print making process. I have a camera, however, whose in-camera jpegs can go further than that. They correct chromatic aberration and geometric distortion in the camera maker's own lenses. They can do auto shadow lifting in high contrast images. In fact the camera can do in-camera HDR, combining several images of different exposures to enhance the dynamic range. If I forget my wide angle lens it can stitch some images together in a panorama employing the usual cylindrical perspective projection of panoramas. That uses the usual cylindrical perspective projection our eyes prefer for such side angle shots, but which as far as I know is not offered by any lens. Until very recently these image combining shots and lens correcting shots were not available in-camera. We can look forward to future cameras which will be able to do the kinds of vertical alignment and two point perspective preferred by architectural photographers in the camera, as automatic settings, for ex-camera jpegs. I know that some of these ex-camera jpeg features are considered by some image realism purists to be going too far. In other words drawing the realism line between ex-camera jpegs and computer post processing won't hold, because the in-camera computers and algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated.
Before the invention of photography we had to rely on artists to capture images for us. Of course artists can draw imagined images, but if asked nicely can produce realistic accurate drawings. Drawings? In which object is separated from background by drawing a line round the edge? A line which does not exist either in reality or the image processing of the visual cortexes of our brains. It seems we accept as a realistic image something which represents accurately certain important features of what we see, even though we see nothing like the drawn monochrome outlines and hatching of a pencil sketch. What's more, it shouldn't be lo before our cameras start offering as one of the in-camera creative modes a "pencil sketch" mode, producing ex-camera jpegs which look just like good realistic pencil drawings.
I sympathise a lot with those who think photography should preserve realism and eschew too much image processing. I attended a famous photographic society exhibition a few years ago which shocked me. I considered more than half the images weren't what I consider photographs at all. They were exercises in creative photoshoppery. Many of the combined images which were taken on quite different days in quite different places. Nothing wrong with that as an art form, but I personally don't consider it should be called photography.
I agree that a line must be drawn between photographic realism and creative photoshoppery. But to try to draw that line between ex-camera jpegs and computer post processing is drawing it in the tidal shifting sands and image processing technology. To try to define what constitutes "too much" image processing fails to understand just what an extraordinary amount of image processing is done in the brain, and what kind of thing the mind is doing when it judges a pencil drawing as an accurate and realistic representation.
We need to develop aa proper theory of realistic representation and from that what constitutes unrealistic image manipulation. One attempt at doing that has been made by the excellent and expensive image processing house which some of the top news photographs use to process their images. They claim that they never add or remove remove any pixel not in the original image, just changing the tonal relationships between pixels. In other words they don't add any person or thing to an image, such as a person missing from a group shot, or remove anything, such as an annoying telephone wire.
That's a good start, but we see more in an image than what is actually seen within the image. For example shadows tell us where the sun was, although the sun is not in the image. I recall that notorious much disputed image of a grieving funeral crowd in a dark narrow alley. People objected to the unrealistic photoshoppery. The photographer said they were mistaken, all the people in that image were exactly there at the time in that place, he'd added nothing, subtracted nothing, just adjusted light and shade to bring out some darkly shaded faces. But in doing so he'd created the effect that the crowd had been very oddly llit by a multitude of external light sources, some of them exactly angled to pick out individual faces. So changing the tonal relationships between pixels in such a way as to imply a light source not originally lighting the original image should also be forbidden.
Does that mean that shadow lifting of dark facial shadows, which my camera can do automatically as a JPEG setting, should be outlawed? What about achieving pretty much the same effect by means of a slight shadow lift by on-camera flash? That's something which most wouldn't notice as an extra light source added by the photographer, but the eagle eyed forensic photographer would spot it from the catch light in the eyes.
I wish I could think of an answer to what properly constitutes photographic realism. I fear that is a shape-shifting chimera defined, like what constitutes an unrealistically wide angle view, as much by fashion, taste, and visual education, as by technology.
I could go on, but I hope it's clear that our eyes and brain do something very far from presenting a simple snapshot of a moment to our seeing consciousness. Yet what we judge the realism of a photograph by is comparison with what we "see" after all this concatenation and rectification of multiple images in the brain. But the camera creates its image from one instant shot on a uniform high resolution sensor, and what's more does so with more detail resolution and dynamic range than many of us are capable of seeing. Hence the need in producing the in-camera JPEG image of doing some kind of white balancing, some kind of choice of how to truncate and compress the dynamic range from the sensor, and so on. The camera maker gives the user a variety of modes which adjust the parameters of this internal conversion, such as contrast, saturation, sharpening landscape, portrait, night, sunset, etc.. The camera maker also supplies the user with a RAW file converter which can do exactly the same adjustments to the RAW file as the JPEG converter in the camera used.
So if you're a believer in the image purity and realism of "getting it right in the camera", just using the unprocessed ex-camera JPEG as Reuters seem to have decided to do, what is the logic of accepting the ex-camera JPEG, while denying the exactly equivalent processing done later in computer to produce an identical image? The only possible justification for insisting on the ex-camera JPEG is because it limits the scope for processing to the simple global adjustments that used to be done routinely in the darkroom print making process. I have a camera, however, whose in-camera jpegs can go further than that. They correct chromatic aberration and geometric distortion in the camera maker's own lenses. They can do auto shadow lifting in high contrast images. In fact the camera can do in-camera HDR, combining several images of different exposures to enhance the dynamic range. If I forget my wide angle lens it can stitch some images together in a panorama employing the usual cylindrical perspective projection of panoramas. That uses the usual cylindrical perspective projection our eyes prefer for such side angle shots, but which as far as I know is not offered by any lens. Until very recently these image combining shots and lens correcting shots were not available in-camera. We can look forward to future cameras which will be able to do the kinds of vertical alignment and two point perspective preferred by architectural photographers in the camera, as automatic settings, for ex-camera jpegs. I know that some of these ex-camera jpeg features are considered by some image realism purists to be going too far. In other words drawing the realism line between ex-camera jpegs and computer post processing won't hold, because the in-camera computers and algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated.
Before the invention of photography we had to rely on artists to capture images for us. Of course artists can draw imagined images, but if asked nicely can produce realistic accurate drawings. Drawings? In which object is separated from background by drawing a line round the edge? A line which does not exist either in reality or the image processing of the visual cortexes of our brains. It seems we accept as a realistic image something which represents accurately certain important features of what we see, even though we see nothing like the drawn monochrome outlines and hatching of a pencil sketch. What's more, it shouldn't be lo before our cameras start offering as one of the in-camera creative modes a "pencil sketch" mode, producing ex-camera jpegs which look just like good realistic pencil drawings.
I sympathise a lot with those who think photography should preserve realism and eschew too much image processing. I attended a famous photographic society exhibition a few years ago which shocked me. I considered more than half the images weren't what I consider photographs at all. They were exercises in creative photoshoppery. Many of the combined images which were taken on quite different days in quite different places. Nothing wrong with that as an art form, but I personally don't consider it should be called photography.
I agree that a line must be drawn between photographic realism and creative photoshoppery. But to try to draw that line between ex-camera jpegs and computer post processing is drawing it in the tidal shifting sands and image processing technology. To try to define what constitutes "too much" image processing fails to understand just what an extraordinary amount of image processing is done in the brain, and what kind of thing the mind is doing when it judges a pencil drawing as an accurate and realistic representation.
We need to develop aa proper theory of realistic representation and from that what constitutes unrealistic image manipulation. One attempt at doing that has been made by the excellent and expensive image processing house which some of the top news photographs use to process their images. They claim that they never add or remove remove any pixel not in the original image, just changing the tonal relationships between pixels. In other words they don't add any person or thing to an image, such as a person missing from a group shot, or remove anything, such as an annoying telephone wire.
That's a good start, but we see more in an image than what is actually seen within the image. For example shadows tell us where the sun was, although the sun is not in the image. I recall that notorious much disputed image of a grieving funeral crowd in a dark narrow alley. People objected to the unrealistic photoshoppery. The photographer said they were mistaken, all the people in that image were exactly there at the time in that place, he'd added nothing, subtracted nothing, just adjusted light and shade to bring out some darkly shaded faces. But in doing so he'd created the effect that the crowd had been very oddly llit by a multitude of external light sources, some of them exactly angled to pick out individual faces. So changing the tonal relationships between pixels in such a way as to imply a light source not originally lighting the original image should also be forbidden.
Does that mean that shadow lifting of dark facial shadows, which my camera can do automatically as a JPEG setting, should be outlawed? What about achieving pretty much the same effect by means of a slight shadow lift by on-camera flash? That's something which most wouldn't notice as an extra light source added by the photographer, but the eagle eyed forensic photographer would spot it from the catch light in the eyes.
I wish I could think of an answer to what properly constitutes photographic realism. I fear that is a shape-shifting chimera defined, like what constitutes an unrealistically wide angle view, as much by fashion, taste, and visual education, as by technology.
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Possibly, but in my experience people usually have saturation and brightness pumped too far up on their monitors, in which case their images would look dull and unsaturated on a calibrated system. The opposite of what I see posted all over t'Interwebs.
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I can get that scenario but faking the actual subject is rather different to enhancing just what is there. Preserving the integrity of the scene whilst enhancing what is there IMHO doesn't make you a fraud. Blatantly adding or taking things in and out of the scene quite possibly. It certainly moves the game from photography to digital art. Something I felt when I saw Bill Curries commended image in LPOTY but then it was entered into a catagory which caters for this type of work. I admire the image in many ways, it shows his vision for the Hydro but its not really an accurate portrayal of it other than the shapes and textures. Its art, not photography. I don't see his work as fraud, but as art. Its not my style but it works nevertheless
Your exposures may be out a little, but correcting a slight error from a RAW in post... big deal. Enjoy your images
Nod
Tootles
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Can't think of any film that renders colours exactly as seen (ignoring the gamut problems!) While some would say that slides do, they would also choose which film to use for certain subjects. Few (for example) would use Velvia for portraits. The negative/positive process was also treated to colour corrections as it passed through the machines (or on the enlarger). Haven't done any scanning for a while but most scans needed a certain amount of dust spotting and colour correction/adjustment.
OP
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Not really, no, because McCullin and Miller relied on timing, subject, composition... and they were all pretty straightforward black and white. While it's perfectly possible to drastically alter reality with a black and white print (Adams for example) I don't think you can level those accusations to the these two. Eric Ravilious is a painter and we don't have the expectations of reality from that medium. We expect, and even WANT subjectivity from painting.
OP
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I manipulate images all the time, yes. I don't do it ALL the time though, with everything. When I do its really quite minimal. I appreciate that everything that comes off a camera is processed to some extent, but what annoys me lately is this wholesale rejection of reality that seems to be normal. I'm not anti anything in this debate (within reason), but if an image looks great as it is, I'll not be "improving" it be making it into something it's not. I'll happily post up images with zero processing if I feel the image needs none. What's brought this to a head with me is the recent Reuters thing... the fact that even photo-journalist images are now quite heavily processed. Most think that so long as nothing is removed or retouched it's OK, but I disagree. The "mood" of an image can persuade its reading just as much as spin in written journalism can, and really has no place in objective news reporting.
It's just one more thing to convince the beginner that it is NORMAL to manipulate imagery, and that reality is somehow undesirable. Ultimately, it's a bad thing.
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LongLensPhotography
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How is that? Film is perishable while digital will take at least a jihadi apocalypse to destroy. When that happens a few files will be the last of my worries.
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But what is 'reality' in a photograph? Motion blur isn't 'real' but we mostly accept it as such.
I'm with you on what might be termed the Flickr aesthetic - contrast, clarity and saturation all pushed to the max in an attempt to garner 'likes'. But there's also the widespread use of shallow depth of field (which I see more and more in journalism) simply because it 'looks nice/professional', which is often used with less of the contrast/saturation boosts. To my way of thinking this extreme subject isolation pulls teh subject out of its context and takes away from the narrative of a picture. Not ideal in a journalistic situation IMO.
LongLensPhotography
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I can get that scenario but faking the actual subject is rather different to enhancing just what is there. Preserving the integrity of the scene whilst enhancing what is there IMHO doesn't make you a fraud. Blatantly adding or taking things in and out of the scene quite possibly. It certainly moves the game from photography to digital art. Something I felt when I saw Bill Curries commended image in LPOTY but then it was entered into a catagory which caters for this type of work. I admire the image in many ways, it shows his vision for the Hydro but its not really an accurate portrayal of it other than the shapes and textures. Its art, not photography. I don't see his work as fraud, but as art. Its not my style but it works nevertheless
Your exposures may be out a little, but correcting a slight error from a RAW in post... big deal. Enjoy your images
Plenty of film images have been faked. Most go through scanner and photoshop anyway. The whole argument is therefore pointless.
I am sick of hearing from journos who struggle to make aesthetically pleasing artwork make silly claims like this. Photography is art with everything that comes attached. The end result is mostly dependent on the vision and imagination of the author, the RAW file is just the middle bit of the creative process. News reporting has less and less to do with photography (snapping to be more precise). It is all about writing some cunning politically twisted articles with carefully framed and setup scenes (like the dead immigrant on the sea) to manipulate the public.
OP
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I'm not talking about the long standing debate about objectivity in the photographic image. Even the fact that a photo has borders.... a frame, can alter meaning. I'm clearly not on about the inherent "honesty" attributed to photography. Obviously, this debate is above and beyond the limitations of reality within the photograph.
Exactly. Aesthetic considerations that only serve to say "look at my photography" have no place in news imagery. They alter meaning.
OP
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My black and white ones don't
LongLensPhotography
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How do you put them in a newspaper or website then?
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Isn't the medium the discussion? No medium no great image.
[QUOTE="Nod, post: 7149443, member: 8506"
Kept backed up and updated, they should. I've seen old negatives which are beyond rescue and prints from the '70s and '80s that have fared as badly (long before prints were from digitised files.)[/QUOTE] That's because they were rubbish to begin with.
Tell you what, take the same picture with film and digital, place the film and CD in a drawer and process them 'both' in ten years....if you can.
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There seems to be a sliding scale of what constitutes a faked image and what doesn't. A saturation and contrast boost is okay, but Photoshopping out a dog cocking it's leg behind your portrait maybe isn't. I don't know where the ok ends and the fakery starts, so here's how I define things in my own mind:
--- 'Photography' is the interaction of light and chemicals. Light entering a lens and changing chemicals on the surface of film, light passing through a negative and changing chemicals on paper. Other chemicals changing the ones on the paper into an image. Things like that. That's what I enjoy doing, partly because it feels authentic (but there are a few other reasons).
--- If it involves digital files, it's no longer 'Photography', it's 'Digital Photography'. This includes working on a film scan and printing the file using an inkjet. That's what I don't enjoy doing, partly because to me it's much less interesting and can often feel fake.
This is a completely personal opinion and only relates to my photography. I'm in no way saying that this should apply to anyone else. In other words, I may consider another person's photos to be 'digital photography' rather than 'photography', but I may or may not like them any less, or consider them to be any less authentic.
--- 'Photography' is the interaction of light and chemicals. Light entering a lens and changing chemicals on the surface of film, light passing through a negative and changing chemicals on paper. Other chemicals changing the ones on the paper into an image. Things like that. That's what I enjoy doing, partly because it feels authentic (but there are a few other reasons).
--- If it involves digital files, it's no longer 'Photography', it's 'Digital Photography'. This includes working on a film scan and printing the file using an inkjet. That's what I don't enjoy doing, partly because to me it's much less interesting and can often feel fake.
This is a completely personal opinion and only relates to my photography. I'm in no way saying that this should apply to anyone else. In other words, I may consider another person's photos to be 'digital photography' rather than 'photography', but I may or may not like them any less, or consider them to be any less authentic.
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This is purely about people, and what people choose to do. Digital has made some things easier. But apart from that, this is 'not' about different technologies.
And making things easier for people is definitely a good thing. If people with less skill are suddenly, with digital means, able to do something they want to do, then it is a good thing for them. If people with a lot of skill, don't think that these things should be so easy for less skilled people, then that's just snobbery.
It's about people, people.
And making things easier for people is definitely a good thing. If people with less skill are suddenly, with digital means, able to do something they want to do, then it is a good thing for them. If people with a lot of skill, don't think that these things should be so easy for less skilled people, then that's just snobbery.
It's about people, people.
LongLensPhotography
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Why would you want to keep a single copy on the worst possible medium? Multiple copies on 3 HDDs and online back up should see you through anything bar nuclear disaster.
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Wouldn't paper be worse?
LongLensPhotography
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That's because they were rubbish to begin with.
Tell you what, take the same picture with film and digital, place the film and CD in a drawer and process them 'both' in ten years....if you can.[/QUOTE]
Here you go, a digital image from 1999. Would have been taken on a kodak 1.4? mega pixel camera. I've lots
I have my wedding photos from 30 years ago - faded and weird colours and softness whilst stored in the album. Must be the medium printed on?
yet I also have images I've previously posted on here (scanned) from late 1890's
Medium doesn't matter. a great image is a great image no matter what it's taken or presented on.
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LongLensPhotography
Th..th..that's all folks!
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Fine art papers printed with the best pigment dyes on pro-grade printers can last up to 200 years if stored well. Any other physical photo media will have considerably shorter lifespan from 100 to just 3-10 years depending on temperature and UV light exposure.
I'm sure the film negatives also don't get any better with time
A preserved digital copy can be printed at any time with no degradation whatsoever.
Both film and digital must be both of good technical and artistic standard to be worthy storage.
Storage of film media is well developed industry. Just look at Holywood studios and how much they spend on their archives.
Digital only needs a good upkeep of a regular server farm or even a few HDDs across multiple locations and duplicated every few years to later tech.
sk66
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The only part of the argument I find has any real validity is the statement about "the art world overtaking photography."
I've always considered photography to be more "skill" than "art." Not that there isn't/wasn't always some artistic elements/considerations/processing to photography, but there has been a heavy shift since the advent of digital.
Personally I consider that kind of stuff "digital art" rather than photography even if the source medium is heavily photography based. But the question is, "where is the line?" I don't really think it needs to be defined... except maybe for news/journalism (and even then probably not as strictly as it's often interpreted).
I've always considered photography to be more "skill" than "art." Not that there isn't/wasn't always some artistic elements/considerations/processing to photography, but there has been a heavy shift since the advent of digital.
Personally I consider that kind of stuff "digital art" rather than photography even if the source medium is heavily photography based. But the question is, "where is the line?" I don't really think it needs to be defined... except maybe for news/journalism (and even then probably not as strictly as it's often interpreted).