ImpossibleFX - photography | filmmaking

November 18, 2006

Posted to the Strobist Flickr Pool today. Enjoy.

Ok, check this out: as a photojournalist (like DH) you’re not supposed to do any kind of photo manipulation because that would be the same thing as writing false information in the text of your story. As an artist, on the other hand, you’re supposed to use all the tools you have in your arsenal to communicate your artistic vision.

Strobist.com is about cheap, DIY speedlite flash lighting techniques and is not necessarily a “how to be a photojournalist” though it certainly can feel that way since the blog is written by one.

So what is this Flickr pool all about, anyway? Apparently it’s here for we photographers to showcase what we’ve learned from the writings of David Hobby to become better technical photographers. Some of us don’t want to be photojournalists. Some of us want instead to be artists so we use every digital darkroom technique we can to express our creative vision.

You can achieve a lot in-camera. But like any good technical photographer who can achieve precise results with his camera, a real artist can make a good exposure, can manipulate the depth of field, compose a shot correctly and use the light to paint a picture AS WELL AS do all the fun stuff in Photoshop that’ll really make his photo artwork.

I do it all the time. I come from photojournalism and I take a damn good picture if I wanted to using manual everything. But I can take that same photo into the digital darkroom and do things to it that I couldn’t do back in the chemical days.

When I go into Photoshop, I’m probably opening the RAW file and adjusting the image to suit the style I intended it to have whilst I was shooting. The exposure and focus may be correct, the colors may be true, but I may want the reds to pop a bit more than could have been captured on “film”. Or maybe I wanted to increase the sharpness of the image because I want to enlarge it and you can do that sort of thing in RAW without all the JPEG-alicious artifacting. Maybe I had a bit too much headroom to crop. Or, which is most often the case, I’m correcting blemishes on the model’s face.

Regardless, I’m not modifying the pose, the emotion of the model, the direction of the light, or the intended composition. I am enhancing a mere photo into something that pops. I didn’t take a bad photo and am trying to fix my mistakes in post.

So the complaint really should be: photographers shouldn’t use Photoshop as a safety net.

Photographers should be more than just people with a snap-shot mentalities and expensive pro cameras. Photographers should learn their craft, learn their camera, learn how to paint with light and THEN learn how to further enhance their images through digital manipulation, not the other way around.

So, learn your craft. Practice. And love your hobby (or your way of life, whatever). :)