The beauty of a photograph- raw or edited?

[rexbobcat]

No camera in the history of photography has the ability to capture reality as we see it.

I don't understand the point of this argument. It seems moot since you're limited to certain stylistic choices based on the actual technology your using. Cameras do not record reality.

 

[jake337]

You start with point "A", which equals no image.

You end at point "Z", a completed image.

"B" through "Y" is just your medium of choice.

 

[manaheim]

I haven't read all 50 pages. I've seen this thread a million times, so I doubt I need to.

Art isn't about capturing. Capturing is mechanical. Art is about interpreting. Interpreting is individual and the execution is mechanical.

Simply taking a picture is mechanical. The choices we make in interpretation go beyond composition and into developing and post processing.

An artist may choose to have a light or heavy hand but the work is rarely done when an image is taken right ooc.

In my experience new photographers feel that an image taken "raw" or without post processing is more "pure", but in reality that's just inexperience and not being able to either truly see or properly interpret the scene in a manner that is beyond mechanical and truly artistic.

 

[Dikkie]

No camera in the history of photography has the ability to capture reality as we see it.

I don't understand the point of this argument.

What I meant was that if you see the full view, and you stand there taking a picture at focal length of 18mm or 55mm from the same full view... then both of the pictures are a cut-out of the full view. The 55mm photo is the smallest cut-out or crop, compared to the 18mm photo.
Same as you would take a crop of the image by postprocessing.
It all depends on how you lookt at it

 

[MLeeK]

No camera in the history of photography has the ability to capture reality as we see it.

I don't understand the point of this argument.

What I meant was that if you see the full view, and you stand there taking a picture at focal length of 18mm or 55mm from the same full view... then both of the pictures are a cut-out of the full view. The 55mm photo is the smallest cut-out or crop, compared to the 18mm photo.
Same as you would take a crop of the image by postprocessing.
It all depends on how you lookt at it

I think you missed the bus on that one. No camera see the dynamic range of light as the human eye does.

 

[Overread]

No camera in the history of photography has the ability to capture reality as we see it.

I don't understand the point of this argument.

What I meant was that if you see the full view, and you stand there taking a picture at focal length of 18mm or 55mm from the same full view... then both of the pictures are a cut-out of the full view. The 55mm photo is the smallest cut-out or crop, compared to the 18mm photo.
Same as you would take a crop of the image by postprocessing.
It all depends on how you lookt at it

I think you missed the bus on that one. No camera see the dynamic range of light as the human eye does.

The other problem is that our eyes don't work like a camera. We don't see a whole scene all in one go, what we see is a select part of the whole, to see the rest our eyes move around very fast to take it all in. During this movement our eyes constantly refocus and adjust the amount of light they let in so that we can best see each different part of the scene before us.
So not only do we have a greater dynamic range, but our eyes "exposure" (if we can crudely call it that to compare it to a photograph) is never fixed and is constantly varied.

 

[unpopular]

I think you missed the bus on that one. No camera see the dynamic range of light as the human eye does.

Typical of their period, thew New Modernist movement were firm believers in the objective truth of photography. Yet, Adams discovered the most significant post-exposure processing technique in photographic history. Adams was well-aware of the limitations of film, and sought a way to compensate it.

Now I am not a fan of New Moderism, but the realization that a camera cannot reproduce our perception out to be an argument in favor of post processing - to emphasize that which struck us - not a submission to the limitations of technology.

 

[Dikkie]

I think you missed the bus on that one. No camera see the dynamic range of light as the human eye does.

That was actually what I was talking about... but somewhere you missed the train.
What you capture with the camera is just a part of what you're seeing with your eye.
From that point of view is the camera already an edit of the view from your eye.

 

[fjrabon]

In some sense, to even say that a photograph is 'an edit' of what your eye sees is a bit misleading. We have binocular vision, thus our visual imagery is also bestowed with a crude sense of depth, which crude as it may be, cannot be recaptured with a 2 dimensional image. Our photographs can give visual cues that restore a fraction of our sense of depth, but our primary sense of depth comes from our brain working out the calculations of the parallax between our two eyes.

Furthermore, you'd be shocked to learn how much of an image perceived by the human visual system is simply made up. Saccades have already been talked about, but it goes further than that. Even as quickly as our eyes dart across the field of view, the human eye really only sees a TINY part in very good detail at any one time, and thus, it tends to scan only the important parts of the field of view. There are times when you perceive that you are seeing details that simply aren't there at all, because your brain just made them up in an attempt to resolve the visual image in a coherent whole, without necessarily always diverting your eyes to a part of the image that it may deem to be less important.

A kind of shocking experiment is to have items that change color, just outside of the center of your field of view. If you're staring at a dot and then have an item that you can 'see', but is just outside of the area you are currently focusing on, you can't see it change color, however, until you diverted your gaze you didn't see it as a sort of grey or whatever else, you saw it as the color it was when you last focused on it. This is because really about the only thing our eyes can see very well outside of the very center is movement. Our brain just makes the rest up.

So, basically, photographs aren't even 'edits' of what our eyes see. In a real, physical, world it is literally impossible to create an image 'as we saw it'. Our brain doesn't see in flat 2 dimensionality. It is much more complicated than that. It also doesn't take snapshots, it takes a bunch of tiny pictures and creates a sort of collage, and it fills in the details of things it doesn't deem important enough to divert our gaze to gain full detail. In some cases it just makes up details out of nothing but a pure guess.

Finally, another aspect to consider is that most images we have aren't seen, but remembered. What I mean by that is the only image you are really seeing is the very one in front of you right this second (and even that is seen out of a sort of short term memory, but that distinction isn't really important here). Anything that we remember has also undergone a sort of very rough perception. Our brain doesn't actually remember but a very select number of visual images. It remembers facial structure that is roughly akin to a pure visual image. But outside of faces, our brain basically remembers a few things it deems important, and then it just completely makes up the details, that are completely forgotten. The only way you can remember a visual image is to study it for so long that you have essentially forced your brain to remember every part as if they were all significant details. And for anything but faces, this requires hours upon hours of close study, if not hundreds upon hundreds. People who have so called 'photographic memories' tend to remember roughly 5% of a visual image instead of the 2-3% most of us remember. The big take away point is that when we 'look at' our memories, ie recall a scene we viewed, what we are actually viewing is about 3% real memory and 97% made up by our brain to create a coherent picture. Any detail that fits the narrative, is just filled in. This idea is why we hate distracting elements so much. Because our brain tends to edit unimportant distracting items out in our memories, we tend to perceive visual scenes as much 'cleaner' than they actually were. Thus, when faced with a pure view of what went on, our brain sort of doesn't like it, because that's not how it saw the image.

What's my point here, and how does it all relate? Well, I guess my point is that how we see things is so different from how a camera sees them, and so radically different from how a real 2D printout could ever be reproduced, that it basically makes little sense to even call a photograph an 'edit' of what we see.

A photograph is an image. That in many ways is the beginning and the end of what a photograph is. If that image pleases, or causes some other valued emotional response, then that photograph is a good thing. How it corresponds to what we see in the 'real world' is of no consequence.

 

[Dikkie]

We're now discussing the difference in:
- what we see with our eyes
- the photograph

And the funny thing is that we see the photograph with our eyes, wether it's on screen or paper.
So if the photograph would be an edit of the reality, we see an edit of an edit.
And if you take a picture of a photograph, the picture is an edit of an edit of an edit, until we look at the picture, editediteditedit and so on and so on.

Another funny thing is that what we see with our eye, is actually processed by our brains. We actually don't know whát extra stuff our eyes sees, that our brains don't process. And maybe our eyes can't even see everything there is.
Think about unknown colours, undefined colours, invisible colours by our eyes or brains.
And not only the colours, maybe there is more stuff we don't see, we're talking about dimensional view, maybe there are 5 dimensions and we only see a few of them?
Range, depth of field, humidity-view, temperature, night-modus. Some products can do things our eyes can't.

I guess I'm going far too much off-topic here

 

[fjrabon]

well, neuroscientists do have a pretty good idea of all the information that our eyes pass along. As far as things our eyes see that our brain doesn't use, it depends on if you are simply refering to the optical eye, or also including the receptors in the back of our eye. The optical eye has no choice but to re-produce all the light that comes through, including wavelengths we can't see. We can't see those wavelengths because the 'sensor' in our eye doesn't recognize them. However, our brain does use pretty much every piece of information that those sensors recognize. It has to if you think about it, because the eye evolved after the brain, and thus it would only be an evolutionary benefit to create sensitivity to something if we could already process it. The only way we might be able to see things without processing them is if they were vestigial, ie were things we could once see, but slowly lost the need for. However, that either didn't happen, or they eye's ability to process that information eroded simultaneously with our brain's ability to process it.

And 'unknown colors' isn't really a coherent idea. We understand how the full visual range works, we understand fully how light waves work. There are 'colors' we can't see, in some sense, but they can't have a visual representation, otherwise we would see them. We perfectly understand infrared and ultraviolet light. It doesn't 'look' like anything, because color is only a coherent concept when you can see it. Color is literally just our brain's way of saying "hey, this is x wavelength at y frequency". So, the idea of an 'unknown color' doesn't really mean anything. That's like hypothesizing there are 'unknown numbers'. It sort of sounds cool until you really think about it and realize it doesn't make any sense.

 

[Dikkie]

It sort of sounds cool until you really think about it and realize it doesn't make any sense.

GHAA ! Partypooper !

Why can't you leave it like it sounds cool and let the illusion stay alive.

 

[fjrabon]

It sort of sounds cool until you really think about it and realize it doesn't make any sense.

GHAA ! Partypooper !

Why can't you leave it like it sounds cool and let the illusion stay alive.

The beauty of actuality, well understood, is more beautiful than the beauty of a misunderstood myth, or so I find.

 

[imagemaker46]

When I shot transparencies for silde shows, they were shot processed and mounted, that's it. Was there any other work done to them, nope. So basically they were raw images. If they were shot correctly all the work was done in camera, so even if they were printed, there was no work done to them, prints from raw images.

With digital I don't shoot anything in raw, personal choice and unless I was doing fine art photos that were being printed as 16x20 or larger, especially with working from a 22mp file, what is gained by shooting raw is minor. I don't really care one way or the other how people shoot or process their images, it doesn't affect what or how I shoot.

 

[sleist]

My photos say no, but I know they want it. So I give it to them - over and over.
In the end they thank me for making them feel beautiful.

Dirty little raw photos ...