Quote:
Originally Posted by jools-elliott
Thank you. You are spot on with the horizon and the reasons behind the slope. It's just one of those oddities.
And yes, people are going way too far with processing things as of late. As photographers, you will all too often hear "well, you must have PS'ed it". A new plugin comes out and you see images plastered across the forums with gaudy processing.
If an image is worthwhile, it shouldn't take you long at all to get the best out of it.
I think the "science" behind photography is slowly being ebbed away because a great number of people are saying "that's alright. I'll fix it later in PS".
The best way to find out how good you are is to go back to basics, get a spot meter and a camera that has no meter in it. You'll soon find a difference without the instant feedback on the screen!
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Jools, photography has always been a two stage process, namely the capture stage and the development stage. With film this meant choosing the time, location and equipment to use to capture your image as close to how you wanted it to look as a finished print or transparency, because there were limits as to what could be achieved in the darkroom, even armed with the nounce of a skilled professional darkroom developer. With digital, the capture stage is still as just as important to ensure you get the right raw material to work within the digital darkroom. Digital editing is not really meant as a means of correcting ones in camera errors at point of capture, it is a means to create and develop your image for presentation using whatever medium you choose. As I said in my earlier post, how you either visualise or imagine how your image to eventually look, determines what digital editing is done to it. I think you have to conceed that you can not create many art style images in camera alone, where the photographer is portraying what they imagine their image to be like and is a work of fiction based loosely on an actual scene.
I believe your style is and what you're aiming to do is record a scene, at a given time, in particular light conditions as accurately as you can to what your eyes have seen. You want to be able to look back at that image and remember how it was at that time when you captured it. You are in effect describing a factual account of a particular location at a definite point in time for prosterity. As such, you will not use an elaborate editing processes because that would spoil what you are trying to put across and change the message. However, when other people look at you image, they're looking at it from there own perspective and this may differ greatly from your own. We all tend to look at images and judge them against what we would have done to the image to present it in the way we would want to. This is why we get so many different viewpoints, but nobody is necessarily right or wrong, it's just a personal opinion, even though there is often a general consensus about certain points.
As photographers, we all have different ideas, different tastes and that only go to show how much diversity of styles there is and how much healthier photography is for it. If some like to heavily process there own images to create the effects they want, then let them, so long as they don't start doing it to someone else's images, that's fine, because if they do there will be hell to play!
06-09-11, 01:30 PM
