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Sky Replacement


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2 hours ago, jaapv said:

Why disclosure?  if The maker does not explicitly claim a precise representation.  Did Rembrandt have to disclose all the elements he altered when painting the Night Watch which was supposed to be a group portrait? There is such a thing as artistic license. 

Why not disclosure? Are we ashamed of the manipulations? With a replaced sky, we are effectively showing our viewers a collage. Why not call it that, or some generic term like 'digital artwork'? I think there are different expectations about photos and paintings (though perhaps, in the age of AI editors and Instagram filters, there shouldn't be).

2 hours ago, jaapv said:

Where does one draw the line BTW? Removing a tourist bus must be declared-a bird in the sky not? Both are transient elements. Do we have to declare dodging and burning?  It changes the light distribution. Lifting the shadows?  It reveals details that were invisible in the real scene. What is the tipping point? 

There can't be a single line for all photography, or for all photographers. I'd leave that bird alone, for most purposes. Some people would take out the clouds along with it. But what is the viewer to make of the image? It could be anything from a photo straight out of the camera, to a completely artificial scene, or anything in between. Typically the creator is silent about this. Perhaps what we really need is a more exclusive term for the straight photo, something that would pass muster by the strict rules of photojournalism or wildlife competitions, but not restricted to their usual subjects. Nothing bigger than a dust spot removed, no adjustments that conceal or distort, nothing foreign added, no drastic colour changes, and so on. Then we can assume everything else is a confection, and all bets about reality are off.

3 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Replacing skies has an honourable history in photography, only back then it was done before taking the photograph. You simply stood your portrait subject in front of a fake landscape.  What's the difference with photoshop?😉 Portrait painting was the same - paint the subject in her living room, then add a romantic Tuscan landscape and clouds.

A long history, but how much of this style of photography do we regard as having more than historical curiosity value today? Many of the 20th century photographers we think of as great artists were reacting against exactly this sort of thing, and the heavy retouching that was the norm for these portraits. Edward Weston began his career as a professional retoucher and then a conventional commercial portrait photographer. Later he would find this artificial prettification 'nauseating' and as he grew as an artist began to advertise himself as a photographer of 'Unretouched Portraits'.

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4 hours ago, pgk said:

To me photography is about taking photographs. Post processing is a means to an end in that it enables me to produce the image I visualised when I took the photograph. Anything else (such as adding bits from other photographs is digital imaging. Easy and simple, which is how I prefer things to be. No misunderstandings.

That is where we differ. For me  - well two percentages. Visualizing the image is 100%.  After that, taking it and producing it to me is maybe 50% in-camera technique and at least 50% post-production, be it darkroom or Photoshop. 

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12 hours ago, pgk said:

To me photography is about taking photographs. Post processing is a means to an end in that it enables me to produce the image I visualised when I took the photograph. Anything else (such as adding bits from other photographs is digital imaging. Easy and simple, which is how I prefer things to be. No misunderstandings.

If you play a musical instrument seriously, you will instantly relate to Ansel Adams's (adapted) quote: the raw is the score, and the post-processing is the performance. 

Post-processing can include many things, including removing unnecessary elements (see work by Andreas Gursky et al.). A bad performance can destroy a score. Similarly, lousy post-processing can ruin an image as well.

Time permitting, I like to pick up an older image and post-process it differently.

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6 hours ago, SrMi said:

If you play a musical instrument seriously, you will instantly relate to Ansel Adams's (adapted) quote: the raw is the score, and the post-processing is the performance. 

Post-processing can include many things .....

But not adding a different tune from elsewhere😉.

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8 hours ago, SrMi said:

If you play a musical instrument seriously, you will instantly relate to Ansel Adams's (adapted) quote: the raw is the score, and the post-processing is the performance. 

Post-processing can include many things, including removing unnecessary elements (see work by Andreas Gursky et al.). A bad performance can destroy a score. Similarly, lousy post-processing can ruin an image as well.

Time permitting, I like to pick up an older image and post-process it differently.

An unprocessed image is a half-product to me. An OOC JPG is a mass product.

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1 minute ago, jaapv said:

An unprocessed image is a half-product to me. An OOC JPG is a mass product.

Post processing is essentialin the same way that a negative has to be printed and adjusted. This is a far cry from printing bits of two negatves together. We will have to agree to disagree. To me photography is about capturing a scene in front of the camera. Digitally changing it beyond adjustments to the single image to produce a pre-visualised version of what was in front of the camera, have little to do with photographic skill and a lot to do with understanding software which is a very different scenario.

Out of curiosity, does anyone think that a painting is a starting point and that copying it and digitally merging it with another is still just painting?

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49 minutes ago, jaapv said:

Never heard of improvisations? 

Indeed.I have heard of them but rarely actually heard them except is very specific instances. My parents were both musicians but I cannot remember either improvising - ever. So this is hardly mainstream and applicable.

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33 minutes ago, ianman said:

So long as it's not in the some anonymous software developers mind.

Used to give a mediocre image impact. But which bears little relationship to the original scene, nor was in the photographers mind when the photograph was taken. I see far too many 'enhanced' photographs which are a result of playing with software rather than anything else. 

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36 minutes ago, pgk said:

Used to give a mediocre image impact. But which bears little relationship to the original scene, nor was in the photographers mind when the photograph was taken. I see far too many 'enhanced' photographs which are a result of playing with software rather than anything else. 

I agree. I just happened to be in town this morning when a colourful parade and samba band of participants in the local Strawberry Fair (an alternative festival of aging hippies) came past. I only had my iphone with me. The results, without any editing by me, were bright, crisp and exciting on the phone and on a small laptop screen, but were unconvincingly artificial and uneditable on any larger display.

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2 hours ago, pgk said:

Post processing is essentialin the same way that a negative has to be printed and adjusted. This is a far cry from printing bits of two negatves together. We will have to agree to disagree. To me photography is about capturing a scene in front of the camera. Digitally changing it beyond adjustments to the single image to produce a pre-visualised version of what was in front of the camera, have little to do with photographic skill and a lot to do with understanding software which is a very different scenario.

Out of curiosity, does anyone think that a painting is a starting point and that copying it and digitally merging it with another is still just painting?

Maybe not painting - but then we are arguing percentages again. But the result can be worthwhile - if done properly.

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2 hours ago, pgk said:

Indeed.I have heard of them but rarely actually heard them except is very specific instances. My parents were both musicians but I cannot remember either improvising - ever. So this is hardly mainstream and applicable.

It's rare in the classical music world, but a few people have an astonishing talent for it. This is Gabriela Montero, who I've seen play in London. Instead of doing encores at the end of a concert, she asks the audience for a tune to improvise on.

Of course, in the rest of her concert Montero plays from the score, which still allows a wide range of interpretive possibilities without discarding notes, or flying in phrases from a different composition. And there's a clear distinction between playing the music in front of her and improvisation. She doesn't want the audience to be uncertain about what's by Schubert, and what's by Montero.

https://www.scmp.com/culture/music/article/2088177/how-jazz-borrowed-improvisation-classical-music-and-pianist-gabriela

'Her reputation is not based solely on her improvisational skills. Montero is an acclaimed recitalist and her Hong Kong concert debut will begin with Schubert’s Four Impromptus, Op. 90, followed by Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9. “That’s the classical repertoire as played by any other classical pianist,” she says. “It’s what’s written. I never improvise within a classical piece, unless it’s a Mozart concerto and there is a cadenza, which in Mozart’s time was meant to be improvised. In the second half it’s all improvised.”'

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1 hour ago, pgk said:

I see far too many 'enhanced' photographs which are a result of playing with software rather than anything else.

Oh I think it goes much further than that. Does the vast majority of smartphone photographers actually know what’s going on when they take the picture? Or understand that the software is making a ton of decisions for them. Or even that decisions need to be made to take a good photograph. Don’t get me wrong, this is not in any way to demean the people who take such pictures, the results can be quite pleasing.
But this has been discussed ad nauseam and I won’t go any further as I don’t feel like having the usual suspects brand me an elitist.

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16 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

It's rare in the classical music world

Maybe now but it used to be very common. The Prelude has its origins in improvisation. The musician would warm up and tune up by improvising in the key and mode prior (hence “prelude”) of the main piece.

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2 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Henry Peach Robinson: photography or not?

One photographer I came across recently was William Mortensen, whose outrageously manipulated, often grotesque images incurred the wrath of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and their Group f.64 colleagues. If their feud had been conducted in a forum like this, the moderators would have had to step in 🙂:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/06/william-mortensen-photography-master-macabre

'It was these kinds of ideas that so angered Adams and his Group f/64 brethren, who published their own manifesto in Camera Craft that same year, devoted to photography that depicted a pure, unmediated reality. This began a spirited debate with Mortensen within the pages of the magazine that became ever more vitriolic. However, Adams did not stop there, suggesting in a personal letter to Mortensen that he “negotiate oblivion”. When fellow photographer Edward Weston wrote telling of his excitement at photographing a “fresh corpse”, Adams replied: “My only regret is that the identity of said corpse is not our Laguna Beach colleague.” ... Even after Mortensen’s death in 1965 from leukaemia, Group f/64 and their flunkies the Newhalls could not stop talking of their loathing for him. Beaumont described his work as “perverse”; Willard Van Dyke, a founder of Group f/64, said “his work was disgusting”; and Adams summed him up with the words, “For us, he was the antichrist.”'

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/oct/06/american-nightmares-the-photography-of-william-mortensen

 

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5 minutes ago, ianman said:

Maybe now but it used to be very common. The Prelude has its origins in improvisation. The musician would warm up and tune up by improvising in the key and mode prior (hence “prelude”) of the main piece.

Oh sure - and several of the great pianist-composers were famous for their skill at improvisation (when I finish my Time Machine...). But it doesn't seem to be encouraged in musical education today outside jazz. Nearly every concert pianist except Montero will play a pre-written cadenza, and most won't write their own.

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