Has Photography become more or less complicated

[o hey tyler]

It is not less complicated, it's just complicated in a very different way.

 

[Ysarex]

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adob...ly/prophotographer/pdfs/pscs3_renderprint.pdf

Camera rendering
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”
– Donald Knuth

The complexities of traditional photography made advances in rendering automation occur
at a very slow pace. Even as researchers figured out what the “average” consumer wanted, figuring out chemistry and processes that would do this was tedious and inexact. Sometimes only
approximations could be achieved. Also, cameras couldn’t send data about the scene or the
photographer’s preferences with each picture to the printer. An unhappy consumer had to send
a picture back to the lab, with notes, to get a better print. Automated systems couldn’t tell that
you wanted the foreground brighter because of backlighting, and they almost always got this wrong.
The digital camera changed everything. In a blink of an eye, 100 years of world-wide color science
research could be applied with much greater ease. You didn’t need to spend years figuring out the
magic chemistry to change the way skin tones are rendered, for instance. You just programmed
the change.
Changes made for skin tones no longer need to affect other colors. The automated systems created
for the quick labs can now be put into the camera itself. When the picture is taken, the camera
can analyze the scene and choose a rendering mode. Those modes can be very complex and far
better than anything a quick lab could do. Additional information is also now available to make
decisions. A light sensor on the camera can read the color of the predominant light source and
set the camera with optimized outdoor, indoor, or sports photgraphy settings. The autofocus can
inform the rendering system of distance information. If you’re outdoors and the whole scene is at
infinity, the camera might assume you’re shooting a landscape and set the rendering accordingly.

The catch
When a digital camera renders its image and stores a JPEG, what you have in your possession is
an output-referred image ready for printing. If all you want to do is print the image as the camera
created it, all is well. However, if you wish a different rendering of the scene with the same quality,
you’re out of luck. The JPEG is a print; it has already been rendered.
In a film workflow, if you received a print from the lab with blown out highlights, would you
send them the print to fix? Of course not. You’d send the negative or slide to reprint. The outputreferred JPEG no longer contains the highlight data or dynamic range that would have been
present in the raw data. There’s no way to recover it.
Camera JPEG rendering is a destructive process. First, the exposure window is set, determining
which part of the scene highlight or shadow data should be thrown away. Then, the adjustment
curves and color shifts are applied to move the image state from scene-referred to outputreferred. The final step is to reduce the image data from the thousands of shades captured by the
sensor (generally 12 bits per pixel) to only the amount needed for final printing (generally 8 bits.)
Even if we knew the original correction curve that had been used, we could not reverse it. A large
portion of the original scene data is gone.

Thanks Keith. I read the referenced paper by Karl Lang -- very good! It just became required reading for all my classes.

Joe

 

[KmH]

But when you edit your pictures, isn't that a form of perverting reality?

Every photograph ever made has perverted/edited reality.

 

[KenC]

It's so much easier now. No chemicals, no waiting, no expensive film or worrying about exposing or ruining rolls. Time that was spent in darkroom is halved by sitting in front of the computer and it is much more comfortable and relaxing.

And boring and you end up with smooth plastic looking shots

You can end up with anything you want. There is a lot of information out there about replicating the look of various films, e.g., which values and toning in B&W conversion will give you the look of a particular film. One can also add film grain as desired. The smooth plastic look (along with oversaturated color, oversharpening, etc.) is just the current fad.

As for complicated, it's what you make it. People used to spend all night on a print to get it just right and some now spend that much time playing with it in PS.

 

[runnah]

It's so much easier now. No chemicals, no waiting, no expensive film or worrying about exposing or ruining rolls. Time that was spent in darkroom is halved by sitting in front of the computer and it is much more comfortable and relaxing.

And boring and you end up with smooth plastic looking shots

I only shoot with expired SD cards. I find it adds lots of character.

 

[pixmedic]

It's so much easier now. No chemicals, no waiting, no expensive film or worrying about exposing or ruining rolls. Time that was spent in darkroom is halved by sitting in front of the computer and it is much more comfortable and relaxing.

And boring and you end up with smooth plastic looking shots

I only shoot with expired SD cards. I find it adds lots of character.

I only process with old, outdated software. Its very hip you know.

 

[runnah]

And boring and you end up with smooth plastic looking shots

I only shoot with expired SD cards. I find it adds lots of character.

I only process with old, outdated software. Its very hip you know.

So you are using the current version of Corel Photopaint?

BURN!

 

[astroNikon]

Of course now I'm enjoying taking pictures of everything else too. At over 9,000 shutter releases now, I'd "shutter" to figure out how much that would be in film cost .. pun intended

Is it necessary to take photos of everything? Probably more thought would have gone into 9K exposures on film. I use various films and two labs depending, but working on my average cost of film and developing it would cost somewhere in the region of 2K € for 9K exposures, which means a 22 cents cost per photo (including print at 9x13). How that works out with your costs I don't know.

I'm not taking pictures of "everything"
just more than astronomy type pictures nowadays

Sunrises/sunsets
storms, rainbows
clouds
flower creeks
flying birds
motion
learning to use flash, multiple flashes and all things fun flash
etc.

of course I'm wasting alot of shots testing the speed of the camera on RAW, vs varies JPEGs .. playing with varying the Aperture, or ISO, or Shutter, or using focusing controls for DOF and all that. Luckily it's not film otherwise that would be a TON of rolls of film. With digital one can experiment all they want and the cost is negligible by comparison to film.

Just the other day I was at a carnival playing with motion. The first time. It's great to get instant feedback and adjustment.

There is a breakeven point between Digital and Film. As I get better though, I might just use the N80 or AE1 to play with film. BUt until then I need to really learn technique to be comfortable.

 

[limr]

It's so much easier now. No chemicals, no waiting, no expensive film or worrying about exposing or ruining rolls. Time that was spent in darkroom is halved by sitting in front of the computer and it is much more comfortable and relaxing.

(Responding both to you and several others who focused on easyness)

Easier yes, but that wasn't the OP's question. Is sitting in front of the computer less complicated? I'd suggest not. It's probably equally as complicated as darkrooms, because you have more tools and options, but you save on not having to know esoteric temperature curves, etc. They probably about balance out. Similarly for cameras, there are more buttons and options now on our bodies, but fewer steps to set them up and less mental math to do per shot for metering and such.

Exactly - it's not about the ease of taking the shot. It's also not about cost. The question was about complexity of the endeavor as a whole , and as many have already suggested (me included), it's not really less or more complicated; it's just differently complicated.

As with any skill, I'd also suggest that the specific elements that might seem more or less complicated will depend on the skills and inclinations of the photographers. I'm perfectly capable, for example, of improving my software skills, and I am certainly interested in this to a point, but that's just not what floats my boat. I much prefer the more tactile and mathematical and mechanical complexities of photography, and so I shoot film to challenge myself to improve those specific skills. There are others who go cross-eyed over chemicals and temperatures but really enjoy the work in front of the computer, and so they choose that set of complexities over which to labor. Potato, po-tah-to. It's as complicated as you make it and you also get to choose how​ it's complicated.

If I were told that film photography was gone forever and I had to deal with digital for the rest of my life, it would seem more complicated to me (after I'd recovered from my heart attack and dark depression ) because I'd have to learn a skill set that I'm not really inclined to enjoy. I'm sure it would be the same for someone brought up on digital who was told they could only shoot film from now on.

Snapshots will always be snapshots, and people who care about their images will always have to slog through a lot of complicated work to become skilled at consistently producing good images.

 

[terri]

It's so much easier now. No chemicals, no waiting, no expensive film or worrying about exposing or ruining rolls. Time that was spent in darkroom is halved by sitting in front of the computer and it is much more comfortable and relaxing.

(Responding both to you and several others who focused on easyness)

Easier yes, but that wasn't the OP's question. Is sitting in front of the computer less complicated? I'd suggest not. It's probably equally as complicated as darkrooms, because you have more tools and options, but you save on not having to know esoteric temperature curves, etc. They probably about balance out. Similarly for cameras, there are more buttons and options now on our bodies, but fewer steps to set them up and less mental math to do per shot for metering and such.

Exactly - it's not about the ease of taking the shot. It's also not about cost. The question was about complexity of the endeavor as a whole , and as many have already suggested (me included), it's not really less or more complicated; it's just differently complicated.

As with any skill, I'd also suggest that the specific elements that might seem more or less complicated will depend on the skills and inclinations of the photographers. I'm perfectly capable, for example, of improving my software skills, and I am certainly interested in this to a point, but that's just not what floats my boat. I much prefer the more tactile and mathematical and mechanical complexities of photography, and so I shoot film to challenge myself to improve those specific skills. There are others who go cross-eyed over chemicals and temperatures but really enjoy the work in front of the computer, and so they choose that set of complexities over which to labor. Potato, po-tah-to. It's as complicated as you make it and you also get to choose how​ it's complicated.

If I were told that film photography was gone forever and I had to deal with digital for the rest of my life, it would seem more complicated to me (after I'd recovered from my heart attack and dark depression ) because I'd have to learn a skill set that I'm not really inclined to enjoy. I'm sure it would be the same for someone brought up on digital who was told they could only shoot film from now on.

Snapshots will always be snapshots, and people who care about their images will always have to slog through a lot of complicated work to become skilled at consistently producing good images.

^^ And there you have it. :thumbup:

 

[runnah]

The advent of screens showing if you got the shot or not changed the game considerable.

The complexity of getting the shot right will never change but technology has made it so that you can work on the technical aspects in the moment rather than spending the time in the darkroom only to find you missed the focus or whatever.

 

[peter27]

Has Photography become more or less complicated (OP)

‘Digital has had both positive and negative effects. It has really opened up photography to a lot more people, and made it easier for people to produce good images. Photoshop is amazing, really, and a lot of the pictures taken by amateurs are as good as those shot by professionals.

‘However, I think in some ways photography has become too easy. Many people don’t really know how to operate a camera and just let it make all the creative decisions. In the past, you had to work hard to get a really good image, but now it’s so much easier and that makes it much more difficult to be unique. Technology has made it less of a challenge and I think that has taken some of the magic and mystery out of photography.’

(John Hedgecoe)

I can't help but agree with the late Mr Hedgecoe on this.

 

[Nat.]

That just sounds like nostalgia to me.

 

[runnah]

That just sounds like nostalgia to me.

Yep. Everything was better back in that day and kids nowadays just don't understand what good music/food/sex/photography/cars are these days.

 

[Devinhullphoto]

Yep. Everything was better back in that day and kids nowadays just don't understand what good music/food/sex/photography/cars are these days.

I'm all about good music from before my birth. I don't listen to much current music and if I do it isn't the mainstream junk.