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Multiple clouds, even instant sunshine could be survived...
and help to keep the site free for all
It's official... digital is crap...
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Multiple clouds, even instant sunshine could be survived...
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There's more than one way to fake a photo and the story. As Hilton says, the camera never lies, but photographers can and do
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/27/photography.pressandpublishing
Plus photographers have regularly used dark room tools to perfect the look of their images. The tonal look of an image could be defined by the type of film used, then enhanced by techniques in the darkroom and to a certain extent reflect individual and easily recognisable styles, Instantly I can think of Sabastiao Salgado, Marcus Bleasdale, Edward Burtynsk, Martin Parr.
There's a possible reason to say that todays digital news photographers have it harder. What was acceptable in the past isn't now. Take Paul Hansens award winning world press photo, that had some lightening and darkening in areas, things that have happened ever since photography started, yet now the images have to be as taken. There's been a rapid change in recent years to no no processing allowed at all.
http://www.bjp-online.com/2013/05/w...tivity-manipulation-and-the-search-for-truth/
So no, I don't think it's that digital is fake because it's easy to manipulate. It's always gone on, just it's easier and quicker with digital. What digital has allowed is the number of images produced from different sources to rapidly increase, from photographers to images from the public recorded on phones. Does this increased competition increase the obligation to make an image more saleable, is it about taking the risk of detection. Some newspapers have proven to have very low morals. It does make you question some images..
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Is this a question of integrity and credibility that photography, for the most part has earned over the years.
In a comparatively shot space of time, digital imagery has driven a cart and horses through that reputation.
Once we could say with confidence that the image we are viewing is in all likelihood, a reasonably accurate representation of reality, now its swung a 180 and we can't be sure about anything.
Is this integrity a specific quality of photography that separates it from painting and other art forms, in that it can't be imaginary.
Steve Smith
Joe
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That's just a theory. We will know for sure in 200 years!
Film looks after itself. As long as you keep it somewhere, it will be o.k. Digital needs backing up regularly.
Steve.
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I think you misread me. I was questioning your apparent despair that 'Even images of war and conflict are made with aesthetics in mind' rather than images being altered.
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manipulated is not the same as staged, staged is a scene that exists created by imagination if you want, but not a figment of it.
photos have always been manipulated one way or another, the portion of those that have vs those that have not has changed dramatically.
this is probably a wider debate than the ethics of photojourn, though photojourn seems to be trying to preserve its integrity, not so photography per se
Nod
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Unprocessed film in a drawer? Be lucky to get anything decent from it in 10 years! Maybe if it's been in a fridge or freezer. I've got CD-Rs from over 10 years ago which still read perfectly and have a few backups of them on HDDs as well as other, newer copies on CD or DVD. I've also got inkjet prints of around the same age, some of which have been behind glass, some in drawers and some just kicking about on desks or pinned to walls in full sun - still fine. As are the semi disposable ones I did on super cheapy Lidl/Aldi paper which are in a super cheapy PVC (or similar) sleeve type "frame" which has been hanging in the conservatory for about 3 years. Yes, the original prints from film were probably rubbish to start off with but they are fairly representative of prints from the time. As are the negatives.
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' Unprocessed film', You mentioned that chestnut NOD not me. Im talking about doing the job once i.e. process the film or save to cd and I aint talking about pictures from when we were a nipper or spending thousands on storage. Film will always be able to be transferred to a medium cd format of today will not.
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You've had a trip to the future and back, then?
Photographs that are judged worth preserving will be preserved irrespective of the medium used to store them. The vast majority of photographs made will either be lost or end up in landfill. Just like they always have.
Nod
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Yup, you could believe what was on film....
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg
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What I find slightly amusing is this comes from a bloke who made his living from shooting black and white and still does with his landscape work. Nothing is further from reality for me than removing colour. His war images automatically create a 'false' atmosphere because they feel 'gritty' etc as all the colour is missing.
I love the Don's work btw but he's taking the p*** with this one.
I think you worry too much pookey, the young are no more stupid than the old, in fact, sometimes they 'get it' better than we do. There will always be trends and fashions and they'll come and go. There always have been, they'll keep cycling.
Reality is in the eye of the beholder isn't it. We all see things differently affected by emotion and physical differences, photography, monitors, prints, light when viewing all affect this. Only the most easily fooled believe over enhancement. Give me a pretty, bright, vibrant, well exposed picture over a dull reality shot every time. I see reality every day driving around, it neither bothers or excites me. Movies rarely show 'real' life anymore either, we want escapism. It doesn't make them crap though.
Documentaries do it as well. Like the latest "Hunt" series on the beeb. Still lovely to watch tho.
I love the Don's work btw but he's taking the p*** with this one.
I think you worry too much pookey, the young are no more stupid than the old, in fact, sometimes they 'get it' better than we do. There will always be trends and fashions and they'll come and go. There always have been, they'll keep cycling.
Reality is in the eye of the beholder isn't it. We all see things differently affected by emotion and physical differences, photography, monitors, prints, light when viewing all affect this. Only the most easily fooled believe over enhancement. Give me a pretty, bright, vibrant, well exposed picture over a dull reality shot every time. I see reality every day driving around, it neither bothers or excites me. Movies rarely show 'real' life anymore either, we want escapism. It doesn't make them crap though.
Documentaries do it as well. Like the latest "Hunt" series on the beeb. Still lovely to watch tho.
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I think Don McCullin was trying to say that the opportunity (and hence a significant amount) is 'adjusted' only he didn't say it very well. That's not to say all are, but with Reuters joining in, a number of press photos found to be modified, competition entries, a number ofhigh profile images over the last few years raising the awareness.
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I've only ever lost one image that meant something to me, I took the negative from the sleeve, and took it to get it printed. Then I mislaid the package that came back from the printers.
All of my precious digital images exist in at least 3 places, all of my analogue ones, are in one place, I know people who have lost loads of digital images, but I have also seen lots of old photos destroyed. so I conclude:
You're completely wrong!
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Good summary
There's nothing new about image manipulation (nor this tired old debate about it, come to that) and if you want reality - in walking, talking, life-size, 3D colour - then you can't get much further from it than a 10x8in black & white print.
We are the most recorded generation in history and also the most accurately and comprehensively documented. Unretouched SOOC pictures and videos of everything are on Facebook etc etc - by the ton. Personally, I'd rather look at some nice artistically manipulated images please
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dont even mention flickr! I was scrolling through some posts on there and there was a photo of a house - it looked like it was during the explosion of hiroshima - it was proper nuked - colours were - I cant even describe it and a shame I cant post the image here, but it had 90 likes(!) Ive never had 90 likes on flickr, I just scrolled on because it triggered a thought inside me whether they just "liked" that image because it will be reciprocated or because they're all high on magic mushrooms. It was the <most> awful image I had ever seen. It truly was abysmal.
OP
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I'm not confused at all. Different films give different results. Shooting Velvia at -0.3 stops gave you great colours, sure, but it never gave you the levels of saturation in landscape images that most people would consider normal these days.. not even close to it.
odd jim
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"digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want … the whole thing can’t be trusted really"
What a load of crap, it wholly depends how you use it, tying the whole medium with this brush is pathetic. I wonder if it's lost on him that film can be manipulated too?
What a load of crap, it wholly depends how you use it, tying the whole medium with this brush is pathetic. I wonder if it's lost on him that film can be manipulated too?
OP
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Sorry to burst YOUR bubble, but I have over the years, lost and damaged more negatives than I have lost digital files. In fact, since sorting out my back up, it's massively unlikely I will lose anything ever again.
Here's my digital back up strategy:
Compared with my film back up strategy which is essentially archive negative folders on a shelf.
odd jim
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You can still manipulate the photo when wet printing. It doesn't need to be digitised.
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odd jim
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How do you know this? I have loads of negatives the have been ruined or lost. It's completely down to how you look after them. Back up your files on and offline, you'll only lose them if there's a horrendous apocalypse.
OP
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How is it crap? Let me bold the parts of his sentence that matter... that you are ignoring.
"digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want … the whole thing can’t be trusted really"
I don't think he's tarring the whole medium with one brush at all. He's highlighting a problem.
Photographers these days automatically alter their images from reality more easily, and readily than they have at any other time in it's history. The first thing many beginners ask in these forums now, is what can they DO to their images... after the fact.... When did THAT start to happen? When you correct them, and tell them to forget post processing for a while, and concentrate on your photography, you actually get objections to that advice.
Strange. I thought beginners should learn photography... not moving sliders around in software to try and make images "better".
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odd jim
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Photography is defined as;
"the art or practice of taking and processing photographs" (Oxford English)
So the medium doesn't come into it - photography is photography.
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odd jim
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For me it's "not about making images better", it's about bringing the image back to what I'm seeing with my own eyes, which no camera on Earth can achieve. That's precisely why I shoot raw. I'm using digital processing to actually make the image more realistic and representative of what made me take the photo in the first place.
I don't l know why some people get a bee in their bonnet about digital processing. I dodged and burned and played just as much in the darkroom as I do in digital for the same reasons.
I still shoot film, obviously far less than I used to now I don't have a wet darkroom. (Even if I did, I'd still chose to shoot predominantly digital these days). I don't like anyone else processing my negs, as I always think I could have achieved a better result, as the person processing and printing my negs simply doesn't care about the end result as much as me. And that IS reflected in the final prints.
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Some people used to get unnaturally saturated colours with film.
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This^
For all of us that did actually shoot lots in the time of film and still do so with digital, none of us here would argue they're not manipulating much more than we used to.
It's lazy to just shrug and say 'but manipulation could happen with film too', because 99.9% of all analogue images you ever saw were unmanipulated. The figure for digital is nowhere near that, and the amount of manipulation commonly done by enthusiasts doesn't compare between the 2 media.
'Choice of film' is often trotted out too (and I've done it), but in this case Don shot B&W and his film choice would have been made to create images easy to reproduce in newspapers, it's not exactly an 'artistic' choice.
Just look at the recent thread regarding the ape image that lost a prize due to manipulation, most 'enthusiasts' couldn't get their heads around how unacceptable that was for a 'news' image. It's scary that people don't clearly understand something so fundamental.
OP
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He shot a great deal of colour work on assignments. However, black and white wasn't a choice though, it was a necessity for the vast majority of work.
I don't think he is. What he describes is a real problem. We're finding it harder and harder to find representations of the world around us we can trust. The best example of this is the Peter Kennard montage that (like most of his work) went viral as a meme. You'll be amazed at how many people think this is real...
With all due respect, I'm in a position to make fairly accurate judgements about that. Not stupid, no, but they are different. Coupled with a dumbing down of education that is masked to most by "facts" like league tables, and exam results... even degree results, I can with some confidence say that actually... in many cases, and in SOME ways, they are. We're getting to a point where I can foresee that in 20 years time, we'll be fully back to where we were 100 years ago with education, with only those from a Russell group university degree getting anywhere, and only S.T.E.M subjects producing graduates of any actual use. This is another debate though, and has no place in here.
I'm not sure what you think they "get" better than older people, but if it's camera controls and basic theory, then the problem is these days is not whether they can get it or not, but the fact that they're not arsed about getting it. Turn your back, and 70% of them will just put the camera back on auto. At degree level, the mature students are by FAR the better students. The kids ignore all the technical stuff these days.... they've been made to feel cocky by F.E courses that reward crap and produce "distinction" students that have never been taught to operate the gear... actually been rewarded for it. Then there's social media and Flickr et al that further rewards they're work produced with no technical skill at all.... then I come along and tell them they need to go back to the beginning now, because we're using manual studio flash, or film, or just because I want to ensure you can use a camera manually in tricky situations... or, being controversial... because it's FUN. Guess how that goes down...
The more mature students just accept it, do it, lean from it, and get better as a result. The kids fight it, challenge you, and invariably continue shooting on auto and making things on a computer that ultimately no one outside of social media is actually interested seeing, and certainly no one wants to PAY them for. By year 2 they start to get it, but by then they're the weakest students and need to work so much harder.Sorry mate... but you're dead wrong on this one, but it's nothing to do with kids being measurably more stupid, but because education at lower levels than I teach at have convinced themselves that these "digital natives" need to do every ****ing thing on a computer. Decisions made by idiots, basically.
That's the majority though. Seriously.... more people in the world think that Kennard montage above is real than not. That's the world now. Despite more and more images being false, more and more people actually believe what they see. This democratisation of photography the digital world has heralded in, genuinely is a double edged sword. The majority of the world are NOT photgraphers, despite the popular saying that suggests they are.
You've been "normalised" by it all probably, and you like it.
That depends what movies you watch I suppose. Hollywood crap, then sure... no reality there either, but then again, would we expect it? Surely our expectations in a movie theatre are different from those we have when we look at the front page of a quality broadsheet.
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dcash29 said: ↑
' Unprocessed film', You mentioned that chestnut NOD not me. Im talking about doing the job once i.e. process the film or save to cd and I aint talking about pictures from when we were a nipper or spending thousands on storage. Film will always be able to be transferred to a medium cd format of today will not.
' Unprocessed film', You mentioned that chestnut NOD not me. Im talking about doing the job once i.e. process the film or save to cd and I aint talking about pictures from when we were a nipper or spending thousands on storage. Film will always be able to be transferred to a medium cd format of today will not.
Ok you decided to take the word 'film' as unprocessed, however didn't pick up that the file to the cd would have been written...processed. Fair point.
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But its only photographers from the 'old days' that give a fig. So what? so they get manipulated. The gorilla and piece of straw, WOW! What a terrible catastrophe. a piece of straw was removed.
McCullin removes colour, how true to life and realistic is that? Its equally lazy to say its so they were easily reproduced in newspapers. You can't argue reality in the good old days on the one hand and then say it was ok to reproduce a scene in mono. It just isnt. Its ridiculous.
This journalistic stuff is nonsense as well, an 'honest and real' picture has always been accompanied by fantastically biased and propaganda laden text since photography started. Why does the poor old photographer have to have integrity when the reporter could (and still does) say anything they like to suit their angle?
OP
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I've been transferring digital files from format to format for years. I've recently just managed to move files from a format that's been redundant for over 10 years to my system.
OP
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I do wish people would stop making this assumption. He shot as much colour as he did black and white.
I'm not a photographer from the old days, and nor do I have anything against using digital. I teach it... I use it... most of what I do is digital, and I probably know more about it than you do, so I'm sorry, assuming that anyone who agrees with these sentiments is some old dinosaur that has just refused to move with the times is false and misleading.
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The point here is silly, you're arguing (uneducated) opinion against fact.
And the fact that you can't understand why news photography should be un-manipulated is frankly sad.
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That's great! Could you point out where its said 'digital is crap' in the link?
OP
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The point here is silly, you're arguing (uneducated) opinion against fact.
And the fact that you can't understand why news photography should be un-manipulated is frankly sad.
^This....
Once someone like Murdoch gets some stats that suggests no one gives a toss about manipulated images, can you imagine the outcome? A power hungry media mogul who has governments in his pocket using statistics that suggests the "public" simultaneously don't give a crap about manipulated images, yet paradoxically are so stupid they still believe the news. Hell's teeth... does that not scare you a little?
If not... then you're part of the problem.
OP
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Sorry... I don't understand the question. I was responding to your suggestion that modern digital formats are less transferable.
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Of course, but it's usually very subtle compared to today's digital manipulations. You can go off at crazy tangents using masks and multiple exposures, but on an enlarger these tend to look completely obvious and actually quite silly.
It's fair to say you can manipulate when wet printing, but to suggest it's the same is completely wrong.