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Bill Caulfeild-Browne

Well-known member
Hear hear, LJL, you're right. Even TV images (try CSI Miami) are over-saturated to the point of unreality, and subtlety of detail is completely lost.

Art certainly does not have to reflect the "real" world, but photos purporting to show it are now unreal.

Bill
 

PeterA

Well-known member
It is a good thing that trends over extend themselves - as they always do. It creates opportunity for a 'new vision' - for those talented and creative and brave enough to look with new eyes - and for a while this new look will be fresh ..until it becomes mainstream.

Photoshop and illustration are the natural add ons to the digital capture realilty - and yes it is all a bunch of crapola. Then agiain most commercial work always has been and always will be.

However photographers are largely to blame for asking for ever increasing DR and ever increasing 'useable' ISO and ever increasing asking for no noise blah blah blah..tehy WANT a photoshop look straight out of the camera..


When really photography for me anyway is abourt working within the limitations of a set of tools - I prefer the look of a 5-6 stop limit to the look of a crappy plastic looking HDR or similar picture - there is NO connection betwen me and my eyes and my feelings to plastic artificial images -our brains do not LIKE the plastic fantastic infinity DR and night time is the new daylight crap.

A goodthing it is easy to get refreshed - it is called a brick of TRX.
 

ptomsu

Workshop Member
Images great, WEB interface is a nightmare!

I like the look of these images but this is definitely something debatable. I would not call it as "the new wave" or "new art direction", as there are much more than just one wave and direction etc. when it comes to art, BUT it is definitely showing a very appealing one!
 

fotografz

Well-known member
It is a good thing that trends over extend themselves - as they always do. It creates opportunity for a 'new vision' - for those talented and creative and brave enough to look with new eyes - and for a while this new look will be fresh ..until it becomes mainstream.

Photoshop and illustration are the natural add ons to the digital capture reality - and yes it is all a bunch of crapola. Then again most commercial work always has been and always will be.

However photographers are largely to blame for asking for ever increasing DR and ever increasing 'useable' ISO and ever increasing asking for no noise blah blah blah..they WANT a photoshop look straight out of the camera..


When really photography for me anyway is about working within the limitations of a set of tools - I prefer the look of a 5-6 stop limit to the look of a crappy plastic looking HDR or similar picture - there is NO connection between me and my eyes and my feelings to plastic artificial images -our brains do not LIKE the plastic fantastic infinity DR and night time is the new daylight crap.

A good thing it is easy to get refreshed - it is called a brick of TRX.
I be damned if there isn't a Vulcan mind meld here Peter. I thought the same thing ... thank God you can still shoot some Tri-X in a Hassey or Rollei (or whatever) with some bitingly crisp optics. :thumbup:

Actually, the world of commercial work was/is my area of expertise ... less as a shooter, and more as the Art Director/Creative Director client of commercial photographers.

The battle being waged is one of grabbing attention in an ever increasing media tsunami washing over the consumer. The objective is to garner attention in a few short seconds at the expense of your competitor. More and more this has led to superficially "enhancing" images to grab the eye. Sensationalism is rampant in just about every sector of communication.

IMO, this practice has been further supported by the lack of ideas from the creatively bankrupt advertising and communications industry, much of which is now run by account drones, bean-counters and research analyst. Not to mention corporate clients that will not even wipe their bums without a consensus opinion, and second thinking what the person at the next level of approval will say. At times, my ideas for an ad had to run the gauntlet of up to 11 levels of corporate approval ... 10 of which could only say NO, never yes. 10 thumbprints on any idea will obscure it by the time it gets to the 11th level ... and if that person didn't like it, it was your fault :banghead:

To be clear, I'm not against manipulation of images IF it is in the service of an idea or enhancing the "moment". We manipulate things like Depth of Field and Composition to lead the eye to what we are seeing or want to say all the time. What I do object to is manipulation that takes on a life of its own to the point that it becomes the primary content.

I see this happening in the wedding photography industry, which went from a repetitious capturing of the same mannequin poses with different heads on the mannequins, to some lively and humanistic "defining moments" by talented shooters ... full circle back to repetitious photos who's lack of real human content is masked by surface manipulation that sensationalizes the eye.

End of rant. ;)
 

jlm

Workshop Member
rant appreciated. style is fine, up to a point, but not the end in itself. I think you could make a case that development in most arts is reactionary.

personally, i like the classic stuff: strand and weston, but can enjoy a well executed Irving penn or Avedon.
 

LJL

New member
Peter,
To be clear.....I an NOT advocating HDR, especially in its presently overused or extreme fashion. I was talking more about how modern equipment can deliver very good DR in a natural way, but that gets compressed and saturated to extremes, thus defeating what was originally captured and delivered. This works for some interpretations, but I kinda like seeing the hints of details in the shadows and stuff at times.

I also agree with what Marc is saying that there has been a growing preponderance of style that borders on what we used to call gaudy at one point, but now seems to be used to grab attention for the client and the product they are selling. Again, I think that works well for some things, but it does tend to be overused. I was flipping through some high end commercial mags the other day and found myself bored page after page until I hit upon a few very simple, subtle, clean ads with little apparent overwork. I found them so much more interesting and attracting, but honestly, I was more into the image than even recalling the product being sold....LOL.

With respect to the changes or cycles that Marc mentions.....I agree. We have moved from the old static mannequin poses to a blur of active "poses" trying to represent more of an editorial capture for the tabloids. Nothing really wrong there either, but the spectacular seems to be lost in much of it. Not sure how much of that is the fault of the shooter or the shootees, but it tends to lack that "moment", or is trying to force one, rather than being more natural and letting the photog really work to capture things.

To me, everything seems so much more hurried. The attention span of the viewer is much shorter in many cases, so splash and dash rules over subtle. Maybe I am stuck in the older viewing world where it is more enjoyable studying a few good images than flipping through hundreds of mediocre or less images. Is it a quality v. quantity thing? I know that cannot be the case with single commercial ads, because there is only one shot that gets used, for the most part, but weddings and even portrait shooting has taken on the life of a thousand images over a few really nice ones. Just my opinion. (Granted, you may need to shoot a lot to get those few, but then again, shooting fewer and more deliberately could work quite well also.) Seems to be a couple of different parts to this tread, and I think that is good, as it encourages one to think about the different purposes for the images.

O.K., time for another cup of coffee to clear a few more cobwebs, and then maybe a trip to a few galleries to look at things again. (I used to spend one full weekend day at the Museum of Art in Chicago, every week when I was growing up, and then 2-3 trips a week to the various museums in Boston when in grad school, usually between classes, just to "study" what the painters had done so deliberately. Most photography today, or maybe I should say most processing today, has a similar deliberateness, but tends to miss the point or overall look at the expense of trying to grab attention.)

LJ
 

PeterA

Well-known member
Lj - my comments weren't aimed at anything you said...my responses were triggered b by lots of comments and lots of experience looking at the way photography in the commercial fashion area in particular has evolved -

Marc makes the pint quite well - everything is about grabbing nanoseconds of attention span these days in a very crowded market for eyeball time...

and I guess this then defines the difference between art and product....

oh yeah - film still rules as far as I am concerned - or the filmic approach using digi does..

give me some genuine emotion or Street Shooting Jazz or a genuine light dressing a landscape or a straight architectural shot - and please - spare me the rest - the true test of a great shooter is an ability to make something out of the ordinary and mundane - and not to try and dress mutton as lamb. -:)

Look at the work of Avedon for example - it doesnt get any simpler than his technology - and yet the breathtaking fashion shots he delivered time after time after time..wow
 

LJL

New member
Peter,
Was not taking offense at what you said at all. Just wanted to be clear that I was not talking about things overdone, but rather carefully utilizing what capabilities in capture may already be there, over enhancing beyond the pale. I agree with you about spending the effort to use what you have to work with when shooting, and that was sort of my point....the tools can produce a lot....except creative genius ;-) Doing the over-the-top processing does have a place, and maybe some of the commercial stuff is that place, but the apparent dearth of creative vision, coupled with the "we can fix that in Photoshop" attitude have worked to transform some stuff from what could be very artistic (like Avedon) to nearly cartoonish in the overcooked way.

The good part of all this is that it can get one thinking more and trying things (going back to some of the older ways maybe?) in order to be more creative, as well as artistically expressive without going too surreal....unless intentional, like Irakly's stuff.

I too enjoy a great moody or emotional shot, even with suppressed details or low DR, but more-so if it looks like what I saw of felt at the time, rather than concocted in post just to sell a commercial style or something. Hard for me to explain. I come from a more photojournalistic background, so overmanipulation of things seems very out of place for me....a bit of enhancement is fine, but not to the point of "wasting" the emotion of the original. Make sense?

LJ

P.S. Want to see one scary future of things? Check out this new tech processing:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch.mp4
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
I thought that some of those photographers took the *art* so far that they lost sight of the occasion.
As a wedding photographer myself I believe you couldn't have spoken a truer word....

To be honest all I'm seeing in the wedding section is an advertisment for the LR presets! :p
 
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