I did it…

[alpshiker]

What do you think of the new tools offered in LR and PS that allow replacing contents, both in terms of quality and photographic ethics if there is?

I went to a place yesterday where I wanted to redo an image of the river coming out of a steep gorge, this time with fall colors. Unfortunately, it had rained heavily in the past days and the start of the path was under water. So I climbed on the rim and wandered there until night. It was windy and I had to take this last shot before dark at 1000 ISO. Back to my computer, I could only assess that this was a miss. Never mind, I started fiddling with some of the new tools. But as you know, content aware fill does not work well on high resolution files, and this was a 270 MP stitched file after cropping. So I took a pair of scissors and cut the slide in two so to speak, to overlap the part that I wanted to take away. Did some work with the healing brush and the stamp tool, et voilà.

The new image corresponds to what I was seeing when I took it, and that a painter would have perhaps pulled from the scene. But I'm a little bothered by the … I wouldn't say cheating, but perhaps the lack of authenticity which led to this result, for I normally don't do more than stamping away some small disgracious elements.

What is you take on this approach? Would you rather not take and display an image than altering the reality ?

For the records, the two trees that I cut away were dead and if I'm still in the business I will check the place in a few years to see if they are fallen. But you know how loggers work, and the nice trees might be gone too.

 

[photonor]

If the purpose of the image is purely aesthetic i dont think it matters. For images featuring people there is a ethical side with beauty standards etc, but i have not seen any research regarding unrealistic forest beauty standards being harmful.

Technically you could have stitched together the same image as the one you ended up with in Photoshop but it would have been a lot more work.

 

[alpshiker]

If the purpose of the image is purely aesthetic i dont think it matters. For images featuring people there is a ethical side with beauty standards etc, but i have not seen any research regarding unrealistic forest beauty standards being harmful.

Oh yes, people are an entirely different problem but we haven't heard of any trees filing a complaint about being altered or erased from a photo . My concern is rather about the photographer's legitimacy. This has never been a problem for me since I do not pretend to convey reality in my pictures, but you know that some photographers don't allow any form of digital means or tool in their workflow. I salute their efforts, especially when their rare and increasingly painstaking analogue process produces beautiful results, for instance Christopher Burkett.

Technically you could have stitched together the same image as the one you ended up with in Photoshop but it would have been a lot more work.

I did alter this image in PS after stitching it in LR, but I think I guess where you are taking me. For this image, I simply copied part of it on a second layer and then moved that part to overlap and hide the dead trees. But I could probably have moved sidewise while taking the images, to have the central part taken with slightly different perspectives, and then I could have painted the masks in PS as to erase the parts that I didn't want to keep. I tried this in the past and it sometimes works.

 

[photonor]

If the purpose of the image is purely aesthetic i dont think it matters. For images featuring people there is a ethical side with beauty standards etc, but i have not seen any research regarding unrealistic forest beauty standards being harmful.

Oh yes, people are an entirely different problem but we haven't heard of any trees filing a complaint about being altered or erased from a photo . My concern is rather about the photographer's legitimacy. This has never been a problem for me since I do not pretend to convey reality in my pictures, but you know that some photographers don't allow any form of digital means or tool in their workflow. I salute their efforts, especially when their rare and increasingly painstaking analogue process produces beautiful results, for instance Christopher Burkett

What about using a long shutter to remove people from a scene, would this upset the "purists"? Most of the tools in Photoshop stem from analog darkroom techniques, they are just more available. Even photojournalists "manipulate" their images by choosing how and what to capture any given situation to emphasize a story.

 

[Rob de Loe]

If we're making art, we can do what we want. There are no universal rules artists have to follow (barring ethical and legal rules of course).

Is it still a photograph, and does it matter whether it's a photograph? That's a debate that has been around since photography. I know what I think, but I also know I don't get to decide for you.

For what it's worth... I don't think it's a photograph anymore. It's a nicely done piece of photo art, or photography-based art, or digital art, or whatever term we want to use for images that started with a photograph and were made into something else. But it's now in part an image from your imagination. That doesn't diminish it as a document of what you saw and felt in that moment, or as a piece of art; it's just that it's no longer a photograph in my particular way of thinking.

Last night I spent a pleasant bit of time enjoying the photographs at the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Award site. I enjoyed many of the images as images, but also because I was confident that if I had been there with the photographers when they made these images, I could have seen what they saw. The fact that these are images of the world I live in, rather than images that exist only in the imagination of the artist, is important to me.

The fact that this competition exists, and that 11,176 photographs were submitted by 1,023 photographers who came from 54 countries, says I'm not alone in how I feel about photographs. At the same time, this is a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of people making images today don't share my perspective.

 

[SterlingBjorndahl]

post this in the Retouching forum instead of the Medium Format forum, and use a more informative subject line rather than click bait?

 

[JimKasson]

If we're making art, we can do what we want. There are no universal rules artists have to follow (barring ethical and legal rules of course).

Is it still a photograph, and does it matter whether it's a photograph? That's a debate that has been around since photography. I know what I think, but I also know I don't get to decide for you.

For what it's worth... I don't think it's a photograph anymore. It's a nicely done piece of photo art, or photography-based art, or digital art, or whatever term we want to use for images that started with a photograph and were made into something else. But it's now in part an image from your imagination. That doesn't diminish it as a document of what you saw and felt in that moment, or as a piece of art; it's just that it's no longer a photograph in my particular way of thinking.

Last night I spent a pleasant bit of time enjoying the photographs at the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Award site. I enjoyed many of the images as images, but also because I was confident that if I had been there with the photographers when they made these images, I could have seen what they saw. The fact that these are images of the world I live in, rather than images that exist only in the imagination of the artist, is important to me.

The fact that this competition exists, and that 11,176 photographs were submitted by 1,023 photographers who came from 54 countries, says I'm not alone in how I feel about photographs. At the same time, this is a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of people making images today don't share my perspective.

Good post.

When it comes to deciding what to call an image with some photographic content, I'm a big tent person. I think a photogram is a photograph. I think Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is a photograph. I think Kim Weston's painted nudes are photographs. I think Huntington Witherill's twisted flowers are photographs. I think the William Mortensen pictorialist images are photographs. I think Man Ray's 1924 nude with stringed instrument f-holes is a photograph.

 

[Bags27]

A discussion as old as when Matthew Brady wired Gettysburg telling them not to move the (decaying in July heat) bodies until he arrives and can reposition them to more dramatic effect.

I shoot only film and yet also use the PS AI to rearrange my photos. Now that's weird!

 

[paulraphael]

As Jim says, "photography" is a big tent, and can contain multitudes.

This doesn't make the questions go away, though. It just suggests that "is this / isn't this a photograph" is not a particularly useful question.

I believe it's often a matter of degree—we can describe an image as being more or less photographic. Small manipulations of content can make an image a little less photographic; big manipulations can it much less. Burning and dodging? Hardly moves the needle. Using spotting brush or clone stamp to remove a specular highlight? Moves it a bit. Airbrushing out your former ally / current political enemy? Bigger deal.

The working definition of "photographic" that I subscribe to comes from semiotics, specifically Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of semiotic topologies. Peirce divided signs (in this case images) into 3 categories: the icon, which points to what it signifies by resembling it (like paintings, drawings); the symbol, which points by arbitrary representation (like language); and the index, which is linked to what it signifies by physical causation (like a fingerprint).

A photograph is, fundamentally, an index: it was caused by that which it depicts. This suggests that film images, digital images, video, photograms, and xeroxes can all be thought of as photographic. The images share an indexical link with their referent (semiotics-speak for subject). And that indexical relationship can be maintained or eroded by what we do to the image.

The second set of questions is thornier, and can be summarized as: who cares?

I do, for one. Not in the sense that "more photographic = good; less photographic = bad." But I think that images, depending on how we present them, set expectations with the viewer. If we break those expectations, we erode trust and risk robbing the whole enterprise of some of its power.

There's much more to be said here; I just wanted to offer some food for thought.

 

[alpshiker]

Thank you very much for the food for thought! First reaction, its very interesting to see how things have evolved over time. The same concern posted some 30 years ago might have received more touchy critiques. At the time in some photo contests, people were warned that pictures manipulated digitally would be ruled out.

An anecdote: I started making colour prints with an older friend who put me on the path to mastering Cibachrome and contrast masks. A few years later, I turned to digitalization and used an external service for Durst Lambda prints. This is where I was able to start manipulating the files, in Photoshop 4 at the time, and obtain more flattering images. But my friend who stayed in his darkroom was quite critical. Oh it's true that I sometimes pushed the sliders a little too far, and the 8-bit scans were not as nuanced as today's digital images. “Hmm! I was there with you that day and there was no sun”.

Anyhow, I have always remained self conscious of how others view the authenticity of what I show. This does not prevent me from manipulating tones and colors in order to make my images more attractive and in reality more beautiful to my eyes. In principle, I only show images that I find beautiful, of real places, that I try to enhance to the extent of my very limited skills in this area. So if someone inspired by one of my photos, goes to this place to try to reproduce it and they realize that things are not as in my photo and that it has been manipulated, you see my dilemma. Of course things will never be like on a photo taken previously, which is confirmed by my photos of the same place taken over the years.

So, do documentary or art, that is perhaps the question as some of you suggest. The problem is perhaps when things are not clear. I must say that I turned to photography a long time ago, because this was a means to show rare and beautiful things, and more dreamlike visions of reality. I certainly received this emulation in my young years through certain artists, some of the photographers that Jim mentions and many others – I was subscribed to a superb magazine at the time: Camera –, and I also liked some painters like W Turner. Don't get me wrong, I do not consider myself an artist at all, but an amateur in the most restrictive sense of the word. And although I tried myself at what photographers seek unspeakably, being what I am and to to keep a sound mind, I have restricted myself to discovering the intimate landscapes which are offered to the voyeur at the bend of the paths.

So all my images are, so to speak, love stories to a certain degree. This is perhaps the reason why I struggle when I want to embellish these images past a point that would alter reality. My friend who I loved to photograph sometimes came back to me after I had edited her photos: “OK it's nice, but it's not me”. Altering photographs can be dreadful.

But I'm first to agree that there are ways of editing photos skilfully and embellish them while preserving the character of the person, or the mood of the place. This is perhaps where true artists are set apart.

I watched some of the photos from that contest that Rob pointed in his post, and what a great display! I watched also another photograper's work that was pointed by Steve Monks in another post. I had to stop looking after a while in order not to throw my computer and cameras to the trash and go gardening instead. I'm kidding.

But yes, editing with the digital means can go a long way. Before that age, I remember the emotion aroused in my young years by the visions of artistically superimposed photos, by the Hamiltonian blurs, by Ernst Haas spun pictures, but also by the magic presence of the first large format prints that I saw. I read it somewhere: a good photograph is a vision of the spirit –or mind if you prefer. For what it's worth. Today we have all these digital filters and masking tools built to help us convey a more dreamlike vision of reality. Maybe this tells us that the reality is lacking something that we unconsciously seek. But this rambling has gone far enough as I'm concerned. How about you?

 

[Rob de Loe]

I think you have a very clear understanding of what is right for you. To do our best work, we need to have this kind of clarity. I've never done work I consider worth showing to anyone else when I lacked that clarity.

There are specific situations where some people can impose their vision of what is acceptable or right on other people. I'm sure I'm missing some, but the ones I think of are photojournalism, forensic photography, and photo contents that have specific rules. After that, it's the photographer's personal benchmarks, and the tastes of the target audience (if there is one). As I've said before, if we're making art, there are no rules.

The thing that I personally value the most about photography is what Paul R called its indexicality*. Personally, I think that if we photographers let go of that quality, we are giving up photography's most important power.

The world is a fascinating, amazing place. Photography has the power to show us how other people see and feel about our world. That's what I love about it. But for that to work, I need to be able to believe that it is the world I'm looking at.

What I don't appreciate or value is deceitful photography. I don't expect anyone else to subscribe to my view, but if someone says they do, and is lying, I'm not happy.

That does not mean that I can only appreciate 'documentary' photography. Not at all! Kelli Connell's Double Life project is fascinating and even a bit disturbing (which makes it more fascinating). I liked it when I didn't know what it was, and I liked it even more when I finally understood what it was and how it was made. Documentary it is not.

===============

* People who participate regularly in this forum are usually quite sophisticated about how cameras work, so I hope I can take it as given that "indexicality" isn't some kind of absolute; I think of it as a zone on either side of "what was there", within which one remains committed to what the lens recorded.

 

[alpshiker]

I think you have a very clear understanding of what is right for you. To do our best work, we need to have this kind of clarity. I've never done work I consider worth showing to anyone else when I lacked that clarity.

That is a very good statement, Rob. It's probably a sort of self imposed discipline, and without discipline we get sidetracked and we miss our goal and lose eventually sight of our own identity.

There are specific situations where some people can impose their vision of what is acceptable or right on other people. I'm sure I'm missing some, but the ones I think of are photojournalism, forensic photography, and photo contents that have specific rules.

When photography is here to prove something? Oh absolutely, there must be an intransigent rigour in those fields otherwise the photographer becomes a forger and even a criminal. But when no harm is done to other people, it's sometimes funny to see how easily some jokers generate the most absurd stories through a doctored photo or simply resulting from incongruous optical effects. From Nessie to UFOs with all flavours of marsupial wolves and big foots.

After that, it's the photographer's personal benchmarks, and the tastes of the target audience (if there is one). As I've said before, if we're making art, there are no rules.

I'm completely OK with that, and I suppose that its just a matter of respecting the viewers to not to let them wander for too long in the free zone between document and art creation.

The thing that I personally value the most about photography is what Paul R called its indexicality*. Personally, I think that if we photographers let go of that quality, we are giving up photography's most important power.

I must say that I have reached the limit of my insight, but I will try to find out what this word means and how it applies. Since it has that importance for you, it is certainly something worth learning.

The world is a fascinating, amazing place. Photography has the power to show us how other people see and feel about our world. That's what I love about it. But for that to work, I need to be able to believe that it is the world I'm looking at.

We all need that. And probably with a pendulum effect between the dreamed life and the one dictated by our daily reality. Otherwise we get lost in fantasy or else we sink into a gloomy perception.

What I don't appreciate or value is deceitful photography. I don't expect anyone else to subscribe to my view, but if someone says they do, and is lying, I'm not happy.

I'm with you on that one too. Some photographs are ambivalent, and are accepted as such because that is their reason for being. But trying to manipulate people's ideas or feelings by showing them what is a biased vision fabricated by our own narrow conception of reality, is a form of witchcraft. And unfortunately, it is a current that is blowing through society today. Some journalists become nasty little Harry Potters.

That does not mean that I can only appreciate 'documentary' photography. Not at all! Kelli Connell's Double Life project is fascinating and even a bit disturbing (which makes it more fascinating). I liked it when I didn't know what it was, and I liked it even more when I finally understood what it was and how it was made. Documentary it is not.

Very intriguing body of work. Is this a pair of twins, or as the title suggests, a single person self portraying herself and blending images?

===============

* People who participate regularly in this forum are usually quite sophisticated about how cameras work, so I hope I can take it as given that "indexicality" isn't some kind of absolute; I think of it as a zone on either side of "what was there", within which one remains committed to what the lens recorded.

 

[Rob de Loe]

That does not mean that I can only appreciate 'documentary' photography. Not at all! Kelli Connell's Double Life project is fascinating and even a bit disturbing (which makes it more fascinating). I liked it when I didn't know what it was, and I liked it even more when I finally understood what it was and how it was made. Documentary it is not.

Very intriguing body of work. Is this a pair of twins, or as the title suggests, a single person self portraying herself and blending images?

It's the same person every time. The photographer shoots with a Pentax 67, scans, and puts the images together.

I'm partial to strange projects like this that someone pursues over many years. It's not something I'd do, but I find this level of commitment to an idea can be intriguing.

The technical excellence on its own is worth a nod. It's not enough, of course, to make the work worthwhile. But this is someone who is deeply committed to her craft, and I respect that too.

If I had a point in sharing this example, it's simply that the value or worth of this work is not diminished because it is what I call "photography-based art".

 

[Rob de Loe]

The thing that I personally value the most about photography is what Paul R called its indexicality*. Personally, I think that if we photographers let go of that quality, we are giving up photography's most important power.

I must say that I have reached the limit of my insight, but I will try to find out what this word means and how it applies. Since it has that importance for you, it is certainly something worth learning.

That's a word that comes from the semiotics theory that Paul R wrote about earlier in the thread.

The problem with words like "indexicality" is they come with a lot of baggage, and that baggage may not be useful.

Personally, I try to keep it simple. What is it that photography does, which is different from other visual forms like painting and drawing? For me, it's the fact that (with all the usual caveats) we are recording what was in front of the lens in that moment in time.

 

[alpshiker]

The thing that I personally value the most about photography is what Paul R called its indexicality*. Personally, I think that if we photographers let go of that quality, we are giving up photography's most important power.

I must say that I have reached the limit of my insight, but I will try to find out what this word means and how it applies. Since it has that importance for you, it is certainly something worth learning.

That's a word that comes from the semiotics theory that Paul R wrote about earlier in the thread.

The problem with words like "indexicality" is they come with a lot of baggage, and that baggage may not be useful.

Thanks for this explanation, Rob. I had to learn first what "semiotics" mean. Even though I had never heard of it, I discovered in this short video that the Greek concept was applied by a Swiss .

"Indexicality " is another word which wasn't even mentioned in my scholar cursus. You have an edge, also as a teacher. But put in simple words, I begin to grasp what the concept means and how it applies to daily life and photography.

Personally, I try to keep it simple. What is it that photography does, which is different from other visual forms like painting and drawing? For me, it's the fact that (with all the usual caveats) we are recording what was in front of the lens in that moment in time.

 

[paulraphael]

The problem with words like "indexicality" is they come with a lot of baggage, and that baggage may not be useful.

What baggage is that?

 

[Rob de Loe]

The problem with words like "indexicality" is they come with a lot of baggage, and that baggage may not be useful.

What baggage is that?

Concepts derived from social science theory can only be properly understood in the context of the theory from which they are derived.

In this case, my point is that if someone wants to use the term 'indexicality', they should recognize that it's a package deal. In your post up thread, you laid out the package deal (what I called the baggage):

The working definition of "photographic" that I subscribe to comes from semiotics, specifically Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of semiotic topologies. Peirce divided signs (in this case images) into 3 categories: the icon, which points to what it signifies by resembling it (like paintings, drawings); the symbol, which points by arbitrary representation (like language); and the index, which is linked to what it signifies by physical causation (like a fingerprint).

A photograph is, fundamentally, an index: it was caused by that which it depicts. This suggests that film images, digital images, video, photograms, and xeroxes can all be thought of as photographic. The images share an indexical link with their referent (semiotics-speak for subject). And that indexical relationship can be maintained or eroded by what we do to the image.

Is the whole package useful to someone posting a comment in the Medium Format forum of DPReview? Given the nature of what seems to interest people in this forum, I'll go with "probably not". I'm not saying it hurts to explain, like you did. I thought that was useful and established where you were coming from nicely. But I may be in the minority.

 

[paulraphael]

The problem with words like "indexicality" is they come with a lot of baggage, and that baggage may not be useful.

What baggage is that?

Concepts derived from social science theory can only be properly understood in the context of the theory from which they are derived.

In this case, my point is that if someone wants to use the term 'indexicality', they should recognize that it's a package deal. In your post up thread, you laid out the package deal (what I called the baggage):

The working definition of "photographic" that I subscribe to comes from semiotics, specifically Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of semiotic topologies. Peirce divided signs (in this case images) into 3 categories: the icon, which points to what it signifies by resembling it (like paintings, drawings); the symbol, which points by arbitrary representation (like language); and the index, which is linked to what it signifies by physical causation (like a fingerprint).

A photograph is, fundamentally, an index: it was caused by that which it depicts. This suggests that film images, digital images, video, photograms, and xeroxes can all be thought of as photographic. The images share an indexical link with their referent (semiotics-speak for subject). And that indexical relationship can be maintained or eroded by what we do to the image.

Is the whole package useful to someone posting a comment in the Medium Format forum of DPReview? Given the nature of what seems to interest people in this forum, I'll go with "probably not". I'm not saying it hurts to explain, like you did. I thought that was useful and established where you were coming from nicely. But I may be in the minority.

I think it's broadly useful in the context of historical debates on what makes a photograph a photograph. I've seen people cling to lexical definitions (looking at the greek roots of the word), or to material definitions (photography must be a chemical and physical process like what was invented in the 19th century).

I don't think these kinds of definitions are useful. But I think the semiotic definition (or description?) is profoundly useful. It's gives a framework based on what I think is meaningfully unique about the medium.

You really don't need a background in semiotics to get the point. A brief overview should give plenty of context. We're talking about the fundamental differences between the painting of a finger and a fingerprint.

 

[Rob de Loe]

I think it's broadly useful in the context of historical debates on what makes a photograph a photograph. I've seen people cling to lexical definitions (looking at the greek roots of the word), or to material definitions (photography must be a chemical and physical process like what was invented in the 19th century).

I don't think these kinds of definitions are useful. But I think the semiotic definition (or description?) is profoundly useful. It's gives a framework based on what I think is meaningfully unique about the medium.

You really don't need a background in semiotics to get the point. A brief overview should give plenty of context. We're talking about the fundamental differences between the painting of a finger and a fingerprint.

We're on the same team when it comes to the value of a rigorous theoretical framework.

My issue is purely practical. I'm in the business of using social science theory in my professional work and teaching. I've learned that people who have become very comfortable with jargon and specialized language often forget how inaccessible it can be, even if it seems simple.

 

[Greg7579]

If we're making art, we can do what we want. There are no universal rules artists have to follow (barring ethical and legal rules of course).

Is it still a photograph, and does it matter whether it's a photograph? That's a debate that has been around since photography. I know what I think, but I also know I don't get to decide for you.

For what it's worth... I don't think it's a photograph anymore. It's a nicely done piece of photo art, or photography-based art, or digital art, or whatever term we want to use for images that started with a photograph and were made into something else. But it's now in part an image from your imagination. That doesn't diminish it as a document of what you saw and felt in that moment, or as a piece of art; it's just that it's no longer a photograph in my particular way of thinking.

Last night I spent a pleasant bit of time enjoying the photographs at the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Award site. I enjoyed many of the images as images, but also because I was confident that if I had been there with the photographers when they made these images, I could have seen what they saw. The fact that these are images of the world I live in, rather than images that exist only in the imagination of the artist, is important to me.

The fact that this competition exists, and that 11,176 photographs were submitted by 1,023 photographers who came from 54 countries, says I'm not alone in how I feel about photographs. At the same time, this is a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of people making images today don't share my perspective.

Good post.

When it comes to deciding what to call an image with some photographic content, I'm a big tent person. I think a photogram is a photograph. I think Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is a photograph. I think Kim Weston's painted nudes are photographs. I think Huntington Witherill's twisted flowers are photographs. I think the William Mortensen pictorialist images are photographs. I think Man Ray's 1924 nude with stringed instrument f-holes is a photograph.

I agree with Jim. Besides, we can't get that cat back into the bag. I think I'm going to stop obsessing over bald vs dramatic skies and just start doing sky replace. LOL.... Well, seriously, I'm considering it.