What you see vs How you feel?

[cbarnard7]

Hi All,

I recently picked up a copy of "Outdoor Photographer" and was interested in something I read.

One photographer (who was talking mostly about landscape photography) said that when he edits, he normally edits how he felt when he was shooting- not necessarily how he saw it. I thought it was pretty interesting because in many cases you'll see someone really feel the need to slide that saturation slider over to get that real warm orange color because that's how they felt when shooting a sunrise. In "real life" however, it may have been half that saturated- but, that warmness sitting outside on a chilly morning until the sun comes out may sway your photo.

Then, there's someone who will see a photo of say, a sunrise, and go, "there's no way it looked like that."

I just thought it was interesting and wondered how many of you edit your photos?

 

[Designer]

It seems like there is usually some difference between one's personal observation (affected by his feelings) and what the camera actually captures.

I don't think I have ever exaggerated a scene, but I am regularly disappointed in the actual photograph.

 

[KmH]

A camera cannot record what you see, because a camera does not work like human eyes work.

Every camera pre-processes an image, from 3D to 2D at the least, but cameras cannot capture the dynamic range nor all the colors and texture we can see.
There aren't to many photograph that would not benefit from some amount of post process editing.

I have greatly exaggerated many images I have made and edit virtually all of my 'keepers'.

 

[amolitor]

To be a successful picture, frequently you have to do this sort of thing.

The real world is 3 dimensional, it moves, we move as we look at it. The real world changes constantly. When we imagine a picture, we're really imagining as much our own reaction to a scene as anything else. There's the scene, in motion and changing, there's me, there's my reaction to the scene. To shove all that through a small 2 dimensional rectangle of tones and colors requires, often, that we choose a non-literal interpretation.

There are cases where just the facts is what you want, but those are rare. You almost always want certain things emphasized, and others suppressed.

 

[GDHLEWIS]

Until recently I always tried to remember how I felt at the time I took the photo when editing. Now I try and edit the photo the best way for what I see on the screen. Sometimes it works for the best sometimes it doesn't. Think in the end it depends what your trying to capture in the photo ect... These days Ill try and not edit the photos I take for a good few days after, this way I seem to get better results and causes me to think of the photo I am taking more. An example is a thread I created on here about welders, I ended up posting only 2 out of the 5 I took. What I thought were 5 reasonably decent photos on the day turned out I only really like 2 of the 5 and binned the other 3 completely. I figure if the photo doesn't still WOW me after a few days I obviously did something wrong during the actual capture of the image. Im still new at all this and even tho I have read countless articles and books on photo capturing and editing Iv found this the best way that works for me. . . for now.

 

[cbarnard7]

For me, I think that instead of going back to what I remember it looking like, I also go by how I felt. I remember taking a picture of my campsite in Moab, Utah outside of Arches. And I remembered sitting there and thinking that it was really, really chilly in the morning (it was nice to have a hot cup of tea over the fire) So, when I was editing the picture, I was more inclined to mess with the blue hues and not so much the orange of the sun on the surrounding canyon walls. I guess to most people, the sunrise would have been the main subject, but I was more interested in the cold morning next to the river and edited it that way.

 

[Gavjenks]

There IS no such thing as a hard distinction between "what you saw" and "how you felt." So it's not even physically possible to separate the two.

Your visual system and memory are both inextricably linked with your mood and feelings and everything else going on with you, such that you have no objective way of even being able to say for sure whether the final image is closer to how you saw it versus how you felt it.

the camera cannot serve as an arbitrator of truth, since it's mechanical function is so vastly different than the eye and brain.

 

[cbarnard7]

A camera cannot record what you see, because a camera does not work like human eyes work.

Every camera pre-processes an image, from 3D to 2D at the least, but cameras cannot capture the dynamic range nor all the colors and texture we can see.
There aren't to many photograph that would not benefit from some amount of post process editing.

I have greatly exaggerated many images I have made and edit virtually all of my 'keepers'.

I agree, KmH. Although, the photographer did edit ALL of his photos, it was just that he was explaining that he edits them differently (how he felt in the moment- [cool breeze, hot sun, freezing snow..etc] and how he saw it [vibrant sky, foggy valley..etc]).

 

[cbarnard7]

There IS no such thing as a hard distinction between "what you saw" and "how you felt." So it's not even physically possible to separate the two.

Your visual system and memory are both inextricably linked with your mood and feelings and everything else going on with you, such that you have no objective way of even being able to say for sure whether the final image is closer to how you saw it versus how you felt it.

the camera cannot serve as an arbitrator of truth, since it's mechanical function is so vastly different than the eye and brain.

I see what you're getting at, and very much agree. There's always going to be a correlation between feeling/mood and what you see- it's how your brain even processes a mood. But, I think there are times (at least for me) where I'll edit a photo slightly different than how it may have looked when I was there in order to "fulfill" a mood that the picture now brings. I guess it's why people use say, an ND filter or something to really, really bring out a dark, dreary sky in order to portray a mood of being afraid/nervous or something whereas in the moment, the clouds really aren't all that dire.

 

[amolitor]

There are certainly times when how you felt is irrelevant, your goal is to create something new, perhaps something that never was, or something that you imagine might have been but certainly wasn't There at That Time.

There's quite a lot of that going around.

 

[Gavjenks]

I would argue that using an ND filter to change how the image looks is more like an example of "Bringing the camera's image more into line with the conglomerate of your own vision+mood"

And I would argue that there exists no way to specifically bring the camera closer to your mood only, while fully controlling for vision, nor to bring the camera closer to your vision only, while fully controlling for mood. On your end of things, the mechanical vision from your eye structure and your mood always should be treated as a conjoined pair, which the camera image is closer to or further from, based on various settings or gadgets. Claiming to separate those components of your own perception out is to fool yourself, IMO.

 

[Derrel]

Digital imaging at this current time in history is, for many people, about performing a LOT of software manipulations on RAW image files, in an effort to create something out of, what is quite often, pretty mundane source material. More and more and more often, we are exposed to images that are basically, heavy-duty software creations. This is quite different from traditional film-based photography, which was much more often relatively straightforward. So there is a tendency these days to encounter digital images which are very much exaggerations, or even outright fabrications, and they are more like "illustrations" than photographs.

I expect an immediate reply that "darkroom images have always been manipulated." Ummm...no, they have not. There was an entire generation or two of photographers who shot color slide images which were in probably 99.9 percent of cases, "completed" in the camera, and developed to one, specific processing standard. What used to be a very involved, complex, difficult process, like say compositing three separate images into one, can now be done by a novice with very minimal skills, and with a high degree of accuracy and believability. In traditional photography, there typically HAS TO BE something worthwhile in the scene, in the shot, actually present at the time, in order for success; in digital imaging, that modus operandi is not so critical, or so many people these days seem to think.

A couple months ago, I saw a photo of two boys riding a water buffalo to school...crepuscular rays shone through a threatening sky...and yet, the sun's light appeared to be coming from one direction behind them, and from a totally opposite direction in the foreground! LMFAO! The photo fairly well screamed, "Look Ma! Two Suns, lighting the planet Earth!" And yet Flickr people loved this blatant fake. It looked pretty clownish. But then again, Kim Kardashian is also "famous"...so...

I think a lot of today's digital imaging practitioners sit down all too often with a pile of crappy images, and Photoshop the chit out of them, and then think they have created something "good". If it were only that simple.

 

[amolitor]

I want a gum bichromate action, and a "scratch" tool!

 

[Derrel]

You could combine the gum bichromate action with maybe six or eight images culled from 10,000,000,000 stock images, all searchable on-line (how handy is that!?), and with a few thousand dollars in computer hardware and $1,500 worth of software, you could make some pretty pitchers!!! You just KNOW the pitchers would be super-awesome, especially with that much software technology applied to 'em!

 

[limr]

I don't do a lot of editing - mostly some tweaking to correct for a little over or under exposure, or to increase/decrease contrast, maybe bumping the colors a bit. Certainly cropping. I don't like images that look wildly different from reality, so I guess I do tend to go for pictures that reflect what I saw. But what I 'see' is often a mood or a quality, not just an image.

I agree that the question includes a false dichotomy. What we see is often influenced by what we feel, and memory is notoriously unreliable, so by the time we see the image, perhaps all we really remember is how we felt and not what we saw, so how are we to know how well that photo captures what we saw? I suppose the preview screens minimize that time delay, but for those who use film or dslrs with the display screens turned off, then there is enough of a delay that starts distorting our visual memories.