Photography is fake. If you think it is an objective recording medium you are sadly mistaken, and are not thinking very far.
Photography can look "real", BUT unfortunately all the artistic/design elements innate to photography are aggressively manipulating your experience (e.g. subject placement/composition, color relationships, depth of field, patterns, rhythm, formal relationships, interplay between tones, angle of capture, focal length, perspective distortions, connotations within, denotations within, themes, motifs, color treatment, type of lighting, exposure, blah, blah, etc.)
Photography is 2-D. It is a flat piece of paper or a flat screen littered with colored dots or pixels. Life is 3-D with infinite resolution.
Our eyes see many times the dynamic range of cameras. Our eyes perceive colors different than cameras. Our eyes create contrast where there is none. Go do some optical illusion games. It's complicated.
Grab your camera and take a photograph of what you see right now in your field of view, make a print, and then compare that print to your real life eyes. It is a billion times different in every which way.
Pointing your camera square at a subject and snapping your camera is not a photo journalistic photograph or an authentic capture of reality. It probably is a lackluster photograph where the photographer did not consider the range of creative choices at their disposal to best capture their interpretation of the scene.
For people who don't believe in processing...there is NO SUCH THING! Your photographs are captured as unformed clay on your memory card or negative and needs some subjective instruction on what to do. It is just a string of data and is not a picture; it needs instructions on how to interpret that data. If you shoot jpeg, your camera is applying a boat load of template corrective adjustments, color instructions, contrast, and sharpening to your images. If you take your images to a consumer photo processor to get prints they are doing the same thing to make your prints.
If you take the same photograph and adjust its exposure, saturation, sharpness or cropping, people will probably read and experience your photograph in a different way. e.g., Just by adding a few points of color, you can dramatically change the tone of a photograph or sometimes by changing your crop, you can turn an unbalanced, unresolved photograph into a compelling and engaging one. So if shooting jpeg, you are leaving these creative choices up to a 'camera preset' algorithm. There is no "normal" for these parameters. It's being decided by your Rebel, the computer at Target, or you.
Photography isn't objective reality, even in the slightest.
Photography means something like 'picture with light'. It doesn't mean truth, nor does it capture it. Last thing: Imagine shooting continuous frames of a celebrity walking down a red carpet. Go through frame by frame of their ten second walk. There will be some frames where they look fantastic. There will be some frames where they look like they have down syndrome (weird face angle, about to speak, transitory expression moment). What is real? Do we experience life as stills ever? No. Besides life being in 3D instead of 2D, it is also time based. Photography is still; Life is never frozen still. Photography is a creative artifact.
No, that is photography too? :er:
