Exercise

Instead of using double exposures or printing from double negatives we now have the technology available to us to make these changes in post-production, allowing for quite astonishing results.

Use digital software such as Photoshop to create a composite image which visually appears to be a documentary photograph but which could never actually be.

For this exercise I wanted to put together something simple but eye-catching, I was looking back over some old images and I found a Black & White image of the Utah state capital building and then i started thing how Icould use it for this exercise. This it hit me – Supermoon. Over the last few years, we have been seeming inundated with “once a lifetime” to occasions where the moon will be so close to the earth it will appear huge in the night sky. These once in a lifetime occasions appear to happen every 18 months – we must have short life expectancies these days – and i have been failed to be impressed by any of them. So now is the time to set the record straight and tell the world what I think a supermoon looks like.

The image is simply a composite if my image – which whist shot is daylight was converted to B&W with a red filter effect to darken the sky and layers with an image of the moon taken from the internet. The Moon was cut and masked. Using a white paintbrush the mask was removed as appropriate to reveal the building and create some shading and the bottom the moon to give a feeling of shaddow.

While the idea maybe simplistic it succeed in one this my friends who live behind the Utah State Capital Building did a double take when they first saw it … so it fooled a local, if only briefly.

Exercise

Does digital photography change how we see photography as truth? Consider both sides of the argument and make some notes.

Photography has not been seen as truth for many years. Anyone with any interest in the history of photography (or was a child in 70’s when the Cottingley Fairies mystery was exposed) is aware that photographers have manipulating images since the very beginning, this list from Fourandsix, who specialises in image forensics illustrates this point.

However, the general public was unaware of what could be achieved through darkroom manipulation, as are many pure digital photographers today (as I have discussed in another post) which lead to the old adage ‘the camera never lies”. Photographic images were seen as an accurate facsimile of what was in front of a photographer, as opposed to the artist brush which could wielded as the artist pleased.

The advent of digital camera to the whole has brought the use of photographic editing software to the forefront of everyone’s mind – “Photoshop” has become a verb and hardly a day goes by without the cry that image has been/ must have been “photoshopped”. It perhaps the biggest cliché of modern photography that everything has been “photoshopped” but as I have discussed in my earlier post the use of Photoshop doesn’t mean we are altering reality

The questioning around the how genuine an image is because of a suspicion of Photoshop has just really triggered many people to question is something staged or not. We expect that wildlife photography, photojournalism and sports photography to be an accurate depiction of what happened, but we have all always harboured thoughts that did the photographer pay for the shot with the refugees, was the animal inticed with food extra. I have been told by a friend who was photographer work famine-torn Africa in the 1980’s that their client was desperate for a picture of an open grave – so he and a colleague dug one themselves have fruitlessly searched.

Digital photography has undoubtedly made photographic fraud easier, as it something almost any can have good at on their home computers but it has made anymore prevalent than it already was.

Is summary Digital photography has changed how we view truth in photography, not because digital photography is intrinsically dishonest but by bringing the knowledge of how it can happen to the forefront of the publics mind.

One thing that gets me very annoyed are people who say “I never edit my images”; “I only ever shoot straight out of camera”; “I don’t believe in photoshop/Lightroom etc”.

These people are in my opinion limiting their photography when I came to photography in the early 1980’s in was all film and a lot of that was film black and white and when you take the time to learn about darkroom techniques you are able to really get the best out of an image.

As the article on the PetaPixel blog shows photographers went to great length in the darkroom to achieve the best result – they did simply get the finished print and drop off at the chemist and be happy with the results of the commercial printing process – which then would have been the equivalent of using the straight out of camera JPEG.

Lightroom/Photoshop etc are powerful tools that can do many such as airbrush models skin, build composite images, fundamentally change colour in an image or even completely remove an item. I agree that some of these tools push the boundries of I guess grass roots photography, but they need not been. If we use it like a digital darkroom.

Darkroom techniques, as you can see from the PetaPixel article show, were dodging (hold exposure back) and burn (increasing exposure) in certain areas of a print to make the best use of the dynamic range that particularly Black and white print film (usually  +/- 4 stops) could produce.Similar techniques were used when printing colour negatives and when making prints from colour reversal film (slides) although these were less forgiving on exposure latitude.

There we also darkroom techniques to play with the colour of images and contrasts pushing or pulling the processing of black & white film i.e. rating the film and a higher ISO and adjust developing time to effect contrast and grain. Cross processing of film i.e. developing colour reversal film with colour negative chemistry – his again increased contrast and gave surreal colours.

None of these techniques are “cheats”, that is they are not getting away from the skill of the photographer “to get it right in camera” no amount of photoshop and make a bad photograph good (although I have come across many photographers who is snap away and rely on Photoshop) they just simply enhance as photographers have been doing for generations.

References

Zheng, M. (2013). Marked Up Photographs Show How Iconic Prints Were Edited in the Darkroom. [online] PetaPixel. Available at: https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-iconic-prints-edited-darkroom/ [Accessed 29 Jan. 2018].