when do you consider photography as graphic design?

[Patrice]

Photography can be purely documentary in purpose, purely interpretive and all degrees in between. The amount of manipulation between the capture and the viewing of an image is part and parcel of the photographer's tools in creating an image that conveys his vision.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

NEVER.

One has nothing to do with the other.

I wonder what you would think of the first stuff I showed in a gallery. In most of the images the photo part was so far gone that you may not have had an idea there was a photo to start with. But the show was billed as a photo show, the images were done on photo paper with photo chemicals...

What was I supposed to call it? LOL. It sure wasn't graphic design though.

 

[sammy]

Some of these new HDR images are looking so unrealistic they may as well be graphic design IMO... I honestly can't stand a lot of them

 

[skieur]

It's graphic design when I completely create an image on the computer and then take a similulated photo of it on the computer too..... No, that is photography too? :er:

Or maybe not. Is simulated photography really photography?

skieur

 

[sabbath999]

I personally don't care one little bit about categorizing photography.

Honestly, when I do a picture I don't care about anything except making it look good to me. I use the tools it takes. Sometimes that is nothing more than printing a negative or showing a slide on the screen. Sometimes it is 95 percent digital darkroom to create the image I am looking for.

Labels are meaningless.

 

[skieur]

I personally don't care one little bit about categorizing photography.

Honestly, when I do a picture I don't care about anything except making it look good to me. I use the tools it takes. Sometimes that is nothing more than printing a negative or showing a slide on the screen. Sometimes it is 95 percent digital darkroom to create the image I am looking for.

Labels are meaningless.

True. I have seen the term: photography and imaging, and that covers EVERYTHING.

skieur

 

[white]

Yeah, what gives with labels? Stupid things. Let's go back to calling everything images. Wicked timesaver that will be.

:er:

 

[kkamin]

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.

 

[Mike_E]

When you take something out of context and use it or manipulate it into an image that is wholly your own.

A tree is a tree until it becomes a 2X4 in my house.

 

[photographystudent]

I think photography just like everything else, grows and evolves with culture, society and technology. Photography in general has not been around for that long, i mean compared to how long humanity has been in existence, it's a short period of time.
So imagine what it will be like in another 20 years when technology has grown.

For now i think it's not fully accepted to digitally recreate an image, i think there is a lot of room for interpretation but if it ends up on photoshop disasters blog then i think it's crossed the line lol.

 

[white]

Post 23 wins at life.

 

[Emmanuel]

wow, so many opinions
my opinion is that if you use photoshop you are CHEATING !!
I belive photography is a SKILL of being able to be at the right place, at the right time being able to capture a moment in time for what it really is !!!
Many people use photoshop to change the sky, to change the tones, to crop it & many more ..... is that photography ? noooo, that's cheating !!!
Why should some "photographer" which uses photoshop get the same credits - fame, with an other Photographer who uses ONLY his Skills - Camera with out editing the photo ?
Just in case you ask, No I don't use Photoshop or any kind of photo editing program on my photos.

 

[kkamin]

wow, so many opinions
my opinion is that if you use photoshop you are CHEATING !!
I belive photography is a SKILL of being able to be at the right place, at the right time being able to capture a moment in time for what it really is !!!
Many people use photoshop to change the sky, to change the tones, to crop it & many more ..... is that photography ? noooo, that's cheating !!!
Why should some "photographer" which uses photoshop get the same credits - fame, with an other Photographer who uses ONLY his Skills - Camera with out editing the photo ?
Just in case you ask, No I don't use Photoshop or any kind of photo editing program on my photos.

Your opinion is fine, but it doesn't make sense. If you shoot jpegs, YOUR CAMERA is applying color settings (e.g. deciding what color the sky is, image saturation levels) and deciding on your photograph's tonal values through exposure adjustments and contrast presets.

SOOC 'straight out of the camera' is not pure; you are just letting your camera decide how to handle these things, and usually its terrible. Ever see a snap shot?

If you've ever shot film, you capture information on a negative. The negative is not a finished print. You need to go to the darkroom and decide on the exposure/tones and the contrast as well as the cropping. Are you saying film photography is cheating?

Learn image processing, it has always been a part of photography since it began in 1826.

 

[Emmanuel]

wow, so many opinions
my opinion is that if you use photoshop you are CHEATING !!
I belive photography is a SKILL of being able to be at the right place, at the right time being able to capture a moment in time for what it really is !!!
Many people use photoshop to change the sky, to change the tones, to crop it & many more ..... is that photography ? noooo, that's cheating !!!
Why should some "photographer" which uses photoshop get the same credits - fame, with an other Photographer who uses ONLY his Skills - Camera with out editing the photo ?
Just in case you ask, No I don't use Photoshop or any kind of photo editing program on my photos.

Your opinion is fine, but it doesn't make sense. If you shoot jpegs, YOUR CAMERA is applying color settings (e.g. deciding what color the sky is, image saturation levels) and deciding on your photograph's tonal values through exposure adjustments and contrast presets.

SOOC 'straight out of the camera' is not pure; you are just letting your camera decide how to handle these things, and usually its terrible. Ever see a snap shot?

If you've ever shot film, you capture information on a negative. The negative is not a finished print. You need to go to the darkroom and decide on the exposure/tones and the contrast as well as the cropping. Are you saying film photography is cheating?

Learn image processing, it has always been a part of photography since it began in 1826.

I get the point of what you mean, but when you see my photo, you can also see what camera & equipment I am using ( here in the forum ) and Imagine how the real eye view was by taking in consideration the advantages and disadvantages of the camera - equipment.
As for the sky color and all the rest, seen people edit there photos, by applying other sky's and other things by using multiple photo layers in photoshop !! Is that fair for me who will have to wait for the exact time to get the, perfect lite I need, and all that I want in THE photo ?
Do people that edit there photos put a tag on there work saying it's edited on photoshop ?

Leonardo da Vinci is famous about his paintings, he had imagination and a steady hand so that he could make perfect paintings, I bet if they had photoshop at his time, he would not be famous for his paintings, as everybody would paint (draw) perfect things.
A believe A good photographer is the person that can take photos and sell, give, show his work right away without having to edit them on the computer.
just to finish, want to make it clear that I don't want to offend anyone, WE ARE in a free world, and can do as we like

 

[white]

Photoshop is not the devil. There is nothing to be afraid of. It is a tool.

When you put a circular polarizer over your lens you are changing the reality of the scene as you see it, and as it would have been recorded had you not used the filter.

Black and white film is highly sensitive to blue and ultraviolet wavelengths. That's why skies turn pure white on the negative and in prints. Ordinarily I shoot with a yellow filter, as that tool helps produce photos closer to what I see, but sometimes for (gasp!) artistic effect, I purposely shoot without a filter knowing the sky will turn pure white. This, again, is changing the "reality" of the scene. I am now interpreting it.

Oftentimes a good crop makes an image hundreds and thousands of times better. See Newman's portrait of Stravinsky; google Dali Atomicus.