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The other day I was looking at some travel images in the Internet and came across a shot of a mountainous landscape so beautiful, with such grandness and divine halo, that I looked the place up in Google and made a note, promising myself to visit it once I found the money and the time.

 

Then I came across a magnificent serene picture of a valley, with scattered trees and cottages, a definition of tranquility and happiness, immersed into the sweet goldish light of sunset, that I took a note of that place, too, and promised myself to be there, at least once in my lifetime.

 

Then I was dizzied by the outstanding colors of a seaside amidst heavenly blue and green waters and golden sand that left me breathless; I said to myself take a note of that, too. So I looked it up in Google, it was an island...

 

But, wait a minute, that's MY homeland island; that's the island where I was born, brought up and spent most of my youth years and, I swear, I never witnessed those colors, either in the sky or in the sea, and I never lived under or beside so saturated shades of red and green and blue and...

 

And I started suspecting that I was being mislead into a Photoshop tourism of a non-existing planet, as if this planet lacks true, genuine beauties to accurately photograph and present.

 

Perhaps the real evil, if any, in today's digital photography is not the sensor in the camera but the post-processing software.

 

Paul

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I 'blame' Kodachrome and National Geographic magazine. Digital photography is only the end of an established chain, blues skies had never been so blue as they were in the 1950's, red lips never so red.

 

Steve

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Ansel Adams was a wizard with post processing.

 

I've yet to see Yosemite or Glacier National Park look like that in real life. :)

 

Yep, nothing much has changed but the tools.

 

The OP should Google Jerry Uelsmann.

 

Jeff

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Ansel Adams was a wizard with post processing.

 

I've yet to see Yosemite or Glacier National Park look like that in real life. :)

 

It about time for the Park overseers to install cement tripod platforms where St. Adams made his pictures, and to advertise just how far from the car one has to walk to them. And I want the concession to work the queue selling red filters.

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... And I want the concession to work the queue selling red filters.

 

But if everyone were as adept as he with post-processing, they could just use a yellow filter and do the rest in the darkroom, as he did with Moonrise over a 34 year period, as illustrated here. He used a Wratten 15 G filter (deep yellow) for the initial exposure. [Although there are few tripod marks imitating this shot, since the New Mexico landscape here has radically changed.]

 

Jeff

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Funny - the French Impessionists did the same thing with oil colors, and I think I saw some saturated colors in some of the pictures on the walls at Pompeii.....

 

The point being that before it was remotely possible to show what one expects to see in real life, that pictoralism was like story telling to the illiterate and non travelers. Everything was put forward as affectation. So not much has changed in human nature.

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Hello Everybody,

 

Another example of how: Altho the technology may change over time. People are the same People.

 

One of the Reasons why many of the Themes from the "Classics" of Antiquity did so well in the first "Star Trek" TV series.

 

Including the episode where Kirk has a dialogue with THE Appolo.

 

Best Regards,

 

Michael

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Funny - the French Impessionists did the same thing with oil colors, and I think I saw some saturated colors in some of the pictures on the walls at Pompeii.....

 

How true.

 

The Impressionists in particular made use of new brighter pigments that came in easy to carry tubes, which made painting directly from life a practical undertaking. They also painted what they felt about a place, so the intensity and balance of colour was as much from their minds eye.

 

The photographic Pictorialists arose at a similar time because they felt they were being left out of the 'expression' stakes as artists. But it was a movement that was at the time limited in intellectual ambition, and it declined as the rise of 'photography as realism' ascended, a movement that can still fool the world into believing the camera delivers some extra sort of fidelity and truth to reality. Yet modern people do understand the use of saturated colour in photography, from the invention of Technicolor to the outlandish seaside postcard, it signals a 'super recognition', like reducing a sauce to intensify the flavour.

 

People have had decades to subliminally understand this simple trick of salemanship, of selling the dream. Nobody looks at a holiday brochure and compares it to the real scene, looking for the same perfection, because they know it doesn't exist. But the better the holiday the closer it is to the brochure image in the minds eye. Reality (in what the mind remembers) for some who have stood where Cezanne stood will be reflected more accurately by his painting than by an accurate photograph of the same scene on the same day. So photographers should question just how useful their strict adherence to the principle of reality is in communicating to a wider world (or even their family and friends). Sometimes blue needs to be a bit bluer, and sometimes it needs to be rendered in B&W.

 

Steve

Edited by 250swb
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Hello Steve,

 

That is an interesting series of observations because some people might see things the other way around.

 

Some people might say: With the advent of photography painters saw the hand writing on the wall.

 

Image capture was entirely changed with the advent of photography. Much like the way electronic calculators replaced mechanical adding machines here not that long ago. A lot of the World that people had known for a long time was gone forever & it was clear that there was no way it was coming back.

 

By the begining of the 3d quarter of the 19th Century photography was a field where a person with no training as a painter, but with a minimal degree of expertise in an unrelated field, could in less time & with less effort produce a picture equal to & often times superior in quality to work by a skilled artist with many years of training.

 

By somewhere in the 3d quarter of the 19th Century artists who tried to do better paintings than there were photographs relized they could not compete & regain their previous place in the World.

 

People are ingenious & adaptive. They will do many things to survive. One day someone invented Impressionism. At a later date someone invented something else & now here we are today.

 

Best Regards,

 

Michael

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By the begining of the 3d quarter of the 19th Century photography was a field where a person with no training as a painter, but with a minimal degree of expertise in an unrelated field, could in less time & with less effort produce a picture equal to & often times superior in quality to work by a skilled artist with many years of training.

 

By somewhere in the 3d quarter of the 19th Century artists who tried to do better paintings than there were photographs relized they could not compete & regain their previous place in the World.

 

Illustrators may not have been able to compete with photographers, but I don't recall any artist throwing down his paint brush in frustration. Painting and photography have never competed side by side, they both achieve different ends by different means.

 

As regards less effort being required by a photographer, well some would say different considering the amount of equipment Matthew Brady had to lug around with him. But art and craft is only ever sold 'by the yard' at its most crude and debased level, the time taken is irrelevent to any serious collector, only the quality and intellectual rigour of its vision is important. You pay an artist or craftsman for a lifetimes experience, not for the time it takes to knock off a sketch or make a 1/500th second exposure.

 

Steve

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Some people might say: With the advent of photography painters saw the hand writing on the wall.

 

And with the advent of modern printing, the handwriters saw the sign on the wall.

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Illustrators may not have been able to compete with photographers, but I don't recall any artist throwing down his paint brush in frustration. Painting and photography have never competed side by side, they both achieve different ends by different means.

 

The concept of The Artist is relatively modern. At one time artists were considered craftsmen. With the advent of the tintype, all those traveling miniature portrait craftsmen were frustrated and lost their businesses to photography, so I would say that at least in this manner, photography and 'art' were side-by-side until photography won.

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.....

 

Perhaps the real evil, if any, in today's digital photography is not the sensor in the camera but the post-processing software.

 

 

No. It's in the lack of understanding and ability of too many to use editing software correctly.

 

No one should be allowed anywhere near a saturation slider or even contemplate HDR until they have passed a test.

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In analog/film times manipulating images was quite limited and a lot of work. But there were filters which could make any scene look like sunsets. I refuse to use photoshop but if photographers don't use it someone else will manipulate these image later. The idea is to "improve" reality to fit social norm or desires.

Art which is untrue is kitsch.

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