Your camera is better than Ansel Adams'

[Original katomi]

Derrel, hiya. I know what you are saying, there used to be huge leaps in camera advances now it seems to be tweaks or one up on rival companies. The canon 90d can take 10fps. I rem the old film motor drivers, get much beyond 3fps and they would tear the film to shreads. Not the a role of 36 exp would last long at that rate.

 

[RVT1K]

Way back when I got my first DSLR, I took a beginner's class for digital photography and the instructor said something that always stuck with me....

"I can teach you how to use your camera but I can't teach you to be a photographer".

I see lots and lots of examples of where someone used their camera properly but still managed to take a bad and/or uninteresting photo. Having a better camera will not change that.

 

[Original katomi]

You see that in all walks of life.
Gives me a real laugh when the kid with the cheap .....whatever.... does a better job than the loud mouth boasting that they have the latest and best.
I was once the person fishing with the old rod that I had since I was 5 and a mix of old naff hooks etc. If I caught something I was pleased.
Seen the same in the photography world, I did the point and shoot, the bridge camera. The canon 1100d basic entry level, seen the loud mouth in the pub after a shoot, placing his latest ff canon on the table in the pub amoungst the drinks with no lens or body cap.
He tried the (when you get a real camera) speak on me.... I asked if he was going to buy it for me..... suddenly it got very quiet.... and no he never did
Sometimes you have to /see/ the image and then use what kit you have to try and capture it

 

[Michael Smith 12]

This is the truth. Even technically speaking, camera lenses, lighting and composition is going to play a bigger role in your photo than the camera body.
Generally speaking, the only thing that matters is your years of expertise, practice and sweat that you put into learning and perfecting your art.

 

[star camera company]

That’s a really good overview, and truthful. There is only ONE way to capture the Perfect image, and that’s with a Stereo Realist, slide film and a viewer. I guarantee if you took the same image with every camera ever made (2D) and then took that image in 3D........it’s a whole different and so much more visually captivating sensation.

 

[pocketshaver]

Hasn't anyone ever thought of this,

Ansel Adams made both good and bad photos, but he didn't need a 3,000 dollar digital camera to do so.

 

[Grandpa Ron]

What I really find annoying, is to have processed the perfect image on my computer screen and not be able to reproduce it in another medium. I have sent digital copies to numerous labs for prints, tried different home printers and even when I send it to another computer, it does not look as good. The image I like is locked forever in my hard drive.

I know that there are various ways to calibrate your gear to a standard model and there is some fine high dollar gear top be had. But the best advise I received was "Enjoy the photo in the media it is presented in."

One cannot expect a photograph, viewed by reflected light to look the same as a back lit monitor. The differences are mostly in your minds eye. So again know the variables of your gear.

 

[Destin]

I spent the better part of a decade chasing better and better gear. I started with a used Nikon D40 and kit lens, and progressed all the way to a D810+D500 combo with a full complement of professional grade lenses.. and I owned almost every Nikon produced in between along the way.

Only once I reached the “pinnacle” did I realize how much money I had blown and how much it didn’t matter. I was chasing pixels and full frame sensors because I was told its what I had to do. I just had to have that holy trinity of lenses and have every focal length covered with no gaps.

I sold off my entire Nikon kit for the Fuji X system a while back because it’s smaller, lighter, and more pleasurable to use. I’ve been entirely happy, and other than wanting some different lenses along the way, I’ve not thought about the quality of my camera once. I would have turned my nose up at a crop sensor mirrorless camera 5 years ago, but nobody cares what my photos are shot on... including me.

Shoot with what puts a smile on your face while allowing you to get the images you want.

 

[pocketshaver]

W

What I really find annoying, is to have processed the perfect image on my computer screen and not be able to reproduce it in another medium. I have sent digital copies to numerous labs for prints, tried different home printers and even when I send it to another computer, it does not look as good. The image I like is locked forever in my hard drive.

I know that there are various ways to calibrate your gear to a standard model and there is some fine high dollar gear top be had. But the best advise I received was "Enjoy the photo in the media it is presented in."

One cannot expect a photograph, viewed by reflected light to look the same as a back lit monitor. The differences are mostly in your minds eye. So again know the variables of your gear.

Why does the "perfect image" require post processing?

 

[Derrel]

I had the perfect beef steak about 10 years ago . I ate it cooked, medium well,not raw. Image processing has been part of photography for well over 100 years, and it has changed a bit over time of course, but there is seldom any image which is perfect right out of the camera.

I shot 35 mm color slide film for more than 20 years, and I cannot tell you how many times images fell short of perfection due what would be minor flaws that could be corrected in 5 minutes or so in an image editing program.

Those who are opposed to post processing are really barking up the wrong tree in this forum and in most knowledgeable photography forums around the world. It has been quite well established that Photoshop and other image editing programs can greatly improve well-taken photos.

Any and all attempts to discredit post-processing as part of modern photographic technique are looked at askance by most people who have spent more than a few years in digital imaging, or who have any background whatsoever in image processing.

For people like me who have been interested in photography for 45 years or more, we understand how magical post-processing is. We have no romantic notions about it, many of us having read accounts about how Ansel Adams and other darkroom masters spent hours and hours creating the perfect print. Today what used to take hours in the darkroom combined with years of knowledge, can be done in minutes and with perfect repeatability. You can create a master print file today and can custom tailor it to your printer. I would not want to trade the quote-unquote digital darkroom for the old fashioned wet dark room.

I can take straight out of camera jpeg images and adjust only the curves and in just five to 10 seconds per image, and make an image look markedly better in about 95% of cases. Back in the bad old days,what now takes two minutes or less used to take an half an hour or so. The fact of the matter is that in digital imaging if you have to do only one correction you can do the curves adjustment in seconds and can make the picture look tremendously better. But if you want a great photo at the end you have to start with something quite good.

Most skilled photographers use post processing as a way to make images perfected. Post-processing is about perfecting things , and not as you have recently stated about taking a bad image and making a great one out of it. You can take a ball of dung and round it and smooth it and polish it and it is still a bunch of s***. Post-processing is not about turd-polishing. If you want to see a great show about turd- polishing, then search on YouTube for the episode of Mythbusters, where they take clumps of dung and turn them into round,shiny balls.

 

[Derrel]

 

[dennyr]

I understand the "Hatred" of digital photography. It certainly made a lot of "Things" a lot easier to do for a lot of photographers that would not have or could not have done so in The Darkroom.

But where does it all start and stop.?
Imagine if photographers, circa 1900, had mass produced ASA 400 film.?
Might that seem like "cheating" to them, might they think a real photog had to battle everything with a tripod.?
What about 35mm film.?....... that (and those tiny little camera) was just for pussies.

What about RC paper.? Talk about being a puss. You only need to develop that stuff for 60 seconds, wash it for 5 seconds, and it dries flat as aboard.!

Ansel Adams gets mentioned a lot. If anybody ever saw the straight negative of "Moon Rise" ...... they would think that the print was a product of Lightroom/Photoshop.

Not sure if it is true, but you often hear of a quote being attributed to Henri Bresson. When asked about Group f/64, he reportedly said...... "Jesus, with all that is going on in the world ...(Spanish civil war and all that was coning)... those guys are taking pictures of F'ing rocks and trees".
Even within contemporaneous photography, there is argument about what is or is not worthwhile pictures.

As i say, i am a bona fide Film-Snob, but i totally get Digital Photography.
That is how modern day photography (in the huge majority) is accomplished.
Lightroom and Photoshop are simply the advancements of the day.
Creative manipulation is just that. Nobody is saying that photography, digital or otherwise, (necessarily) mimics "Real Life"

Photojournalism is always the exception. Then again, NOBODY is a proponent of photo-shopping a uniformed soldier of Country ABC slitting the throat of a civilian from Country XYZ. Nobody of any worth would push that narrative.

But that has always been a risk with photography.
Pictures, regardless of the medium, can never be assumed to represent the "Truth".

 

[Tim Tucker 2]

I just don't get this idea that you can just point a camera at something and press a button for it to capture that *reality* in glorious accuracy, then all you need to do is just display it on a screen or 10"x 8" print to be able to see that reality in glorious detail...

Anybody who doesn't realise that the fundamental nature of of what you see in the real world is quite different to what you see on a screen or in print doesn't really understand photography.

An image on screen is 2D and not 3D, relationships don't change when you move around it as they would with a real object, they contain a different range of brightness than the real object and so contrasts and perceptions of colours are quite different to the real world, they are viewed as a rectangle rather than *all encompassing vision* in an environment and lighting often quite different to that in which they are shot.

Film doesn't capture any objective reality as in it captures an exact record of light and when you print that you see that light correctly. It's mainly silver halide chemistry modified with dyes that works on a tri-colour system that when printed on paper that also has three layers of colour only looks the same as the real world simply because our human eyes also work on a tri-colour system.

A computer screen displays a whole image with just narrow bands of red green and blue, you really can't get much more different than reality with it's full spectrum of reflected light. The modification, or difference, between the light entering the camera and that emitted by the screen is immense!

All imagery is like this, it is all highly modified so it looks the same under different conditions and with different contrasts and light intensities. With digital that conversion is largely automatic, but still done with a perceptual intent rather than as an absolute measurement, with film it is designed into the structure of the film and the processing/printing.

No photographic image is the exact capture and exact re-transmission of light, it is all highly modified. The whole argument of precision capture and display is flawed because the photographic process does neither. But if you modify that information in the correct way you can use only narrow bands of red, green and blue to produce a 2D image that looks the same as the real scene. Quite an achievement...

And yet because it looks the same we glance and assume that we've captured and objective reality with the camera and displayed that unchanged on screen or in print. And because we haven't moved any slider ourselves we assume the data is untouched and somehow pristine and reflects a truer reality...

 

[The_Traveler]

Why does the "perfect image" require post processing?

Because Mother Nature's offering does not always match the finished image I want.
That is the ART part.

 

[pocketshaver]

Why does the "perfect image" require post processing?

Because Mother Nature's offering does not always match the finished image I want.
That is the ART part.

then be a painter, the painting isn't supposed to be realistic.

But if the say, sunset in front of you doesn't meet your ideals of a sunset, why waste time taking photos of it that youll need to doctor up to meet those standards you have..