Going too far digitally?

[panzershreck]

Yes.

LWW

technically speaking, the negative is just no longer in the hands of the printer of the photograph... you could cut a negative in half, and the negative still exists... you could cover it in mud, and it still exists...

of course, that brings up an issue, manipulation of the original negative, which is by no means perfect either... i can manipulate the negative in development, and things that were in real life, may disappear, then the negative no longer conveys "reality"... how much does "reality" conform to the way a lens manipulates the light before it strikes the film surface? get some dirt on it, or scratches, and now spots have appeared that weren't originally there, or were they bugs or dirt/dust on the lens?

the only thing that is honest in photography is the electromagnetic spectrum of light, everything else is an illusion, which is basically what all art forms are about - creating illusions, how much they reflect what the artist saw, is up to the artist and how he uses his medium

a photographer could take a photo of an event, and either crop in printing, crop by moving forwards or using a different lens, or crop by matting with a lens hood... now, things that were there, are no longer there... if X and Y were next to eachother, and the photographer takes a picture of X only, does Y exist? does the photograph convey reality? what if the lens distorts the size of people or their relation to eachother? what if you flatten the image by using flash or too much light in general, does the object, in reality, have no shape? of course it does, but the negative doesn't convey that...

the amount of faith a person puts into the honesty of art, isn't grounds, imo, for a definition of that artform, and it's also very ambiguous, because it's more of an argument about visual media, rather than photography

 

[LWW]

I see your point...but it doesn't change the fact that a photo thru a fisheye lens was still light that actually passed through glass onto film, everything in the photo was REAL. At the same time cropping something from a photo is just that...it limited the range of view, it didn't digitally remove someone and put someone/thing else back in their place.

LWW

 

[Hertz van Rental]

It's all a non-argument. Our experience of reality is that it is 3-Dimensional and that time passes. A photograph is a 2-Dimensional representation and time is excluded. That's a pretty severe manipulation to begin with. Anything else is just tinkering around the edges

 

[cmptrdewd]

The only way for us to tell what something is is how we perceive it. What if we are all in the matrix? What if everything we see is not real? What is real? It is what we preceive it to be. We don't know anything apart from what we sense, feel or think. Forget what a photograph is, how do we know a photograph is?

Don't think to hard. :lmao:

--Aaron

 

[LWW]

Our experience of reality is that it is 3-Dimensional and that time passes. A photograph is a 2-Dimensional representation and time is excluded. That's a pretty severe manipulation to begin with.

I disagree...I don't see that as a manipulation of reality, I see it as a proof of reality.

LWW