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Member Since: 5/2006Last Seen: 10/19/2007

Photography: In A State Of Manipulation

News Type: Other — Fri May 12, 2006 10:30 PM EDT
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http://tinyurl.com/lfp8l
http://tinyurl.com/p9jmf
http://tinyurl.com/ml2yc
http://tinyurl.com/oddqe

Can anyone see anything wrong with the above photographs? No? I'll tell you then: every single one of them has been manipulated. Some, not to a very large extent (http://tinyurl.com/lfp8l just some burning-in along the bottom) but in others (http://www.deviantart.com/view/31605636/), two different images were taken and then pasted together in Photoshop or some other application. This may not seem like a crisis to casual photo browsers. Just more awesome images to look at yes? The problem is that I found every single one of the above images either featured by the Admins on a very prominent art site (Deviantart.com) or featured by a very well respected user. What stops these people from entering these photographs into contests and winning over people when they have a completely unfair advantage? Therein lies the problem.
I invite you to look at some unmanipulated images that make so much more of a statement than the above images:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/31925746/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/31245252/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/32397359/

These were also featured works on DA.com. Ansel Adams never had a computer to create spectacular photos so why should we accept these photos as works of art?
All this article has turned in to is a rant because I cannot think of any sure way to stop this from happening. I read an article about a group of university students who developed an application that used algorithms to determine if a photograph was manipulated or not. Maybe something like that needs to happen? I just really hope to never see manipulated photographs in any contest I enter.

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{"commentId":123863,"authorDomain":"trsands"}
Tom Sands

I agree. While the manipulated photos are beautiful, I much prefer the unmanipulated ones. Maybe I am biased by the fact that I learned on Tri-x film with a manual Pentex in the mid 70's. Ansel Adams was everything to me. I would have done anything to be able to afford a medium format camera.

I would hope that at least in any photo contest manipulated images would be separated from the "real" ones. In these days of Photoshop and cheaper clones there should really be a completely different classification of computer aided photographs than just straight forward photographs.

{"commentId":123863,"threadId":"20832","contentId":"195699","authorDomain":"trsands"}
  • 1 vote
Reply#1 - Fri May 12, 2006 11:11 PM EDT
{"commentId":123911,"authorDomain":"hlg"}
hlg

Digital photography seems to be heavily influencing this by allowing people to go buy a $200 camera and take pictures nearly as good as the above. Then, if their stupid snap shots aren't up to par and they reckon that they are "pros", they'll go DL and crack PSCS2 and make their horrible pictures much better.
I think something needs to be done within the community to adress this.

{"commentId":123911,"threadId":"20832","contentId":"195699","authorDomain":"hlg"}
    #1.1 - Sat May 13, 2006 12:37 AM EDT
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    {"commentId":131778,"authorDomain":"transparent"}
    Transparent Opal

    *chuckle* I feel quite the opposite, actually. Photography is art. If a painter uses strokes of paint on a canvas, why shouldn't a photographer use pieces of images as his media? Art is about what it says, as you have noted, yourself. The statement art makes is the symbolism which is contained in the motifs of the square or rectangular photo. Whether those images got there artificially, or serendipitously made it into the camera lens altogether at once doesn't really matter, in my opinion. But I certainly tip my hat to you ~แป ~ for your desire for purity in art .

    {"commentId":131778,"threadId":"20832","contentId":"195699","authorDomain":"transparent"}
    • 1 vote
    Reply#2 - Sun May 21, 2006 7:29 PM EDT
    {"commentId":217565,"authorDomain":"graphix"}
    graphix

    I know this is old...but just spotted it. What you don't realize is that ansel adams was, perhaps, the first "photoshopper" he often times combined two exposures of a scene into one print, as well as burning and dodging, etc etc.

    If you work in a darkroom at all you are basically photoshopping your images at one point or another.

    {"commentId":217565,"threadId":"20832","contentId":"195699","authorDomain":"graphix"}
    • 1 vote
    Reply#3 - Sun Jul 23, 2006 2:51 AM EDT
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