Digital photography and truth

It can be said that in the age of digital photography the photographer has more control than ever over the image from capture to finished image.  Unlike film, digital photographs can always be adjusted even after the finished image.  There is also the opening for many interpretations of a single image from a black and white rendering to a colour version.  With access to every pixel in the image the photographer can make changes and alterations that were not possible with film.

This presents us with a new issue - meaning and content in an image.  Images are now open to manipulation and the 'truth' of a photograph is questioned.  The most common perception of this is the airbrushed images of the rich and famous and models in magazines.  I think most anger is about image manipulation is directed at that industry because of the effects it has on people.  However an image where the sky has been replaced or the landscape altered seem to draw less attention.

The reality of digital photography means that there are no longer any clear lines between what it acceptable and what is not.  It is not purely down to ethics.  There is a series of image adjustments from the basic preparation of a digital file to produces a fake image.

Raw files need to be processed.  This can be viewed as a technical matter and are considered normal when shooting digitally.  We look at

• Brightness 
• Contrast
• Black and white points
• White balance

The raw file can be seen as a digital negative not unlike a film negative in an intermediate stage between capture and display.

Departing from the standard normal adjustments or processing of a digital file we have to look at interpretation.  In the previous section of the course we looked at enhancing the image and monochrome conversions.  

I suppose the real departure from what we may refer to as standard and a basic level of interpretation comes about when we look at correcting an image.  

Removing dust marks from the sensor which appear in your image could be considered natural or a necessary part of image processing but what about removing unwanted artefacts?  Or people?  

I'm not 100% sure about where I stand ethically on image manipulation.  I do feel that heavily manipulated images have a tendency towards the fake.  However I haven't quite made up my mind if this is necessarily good or bad.  It would be bad if the photographer produced an imaged to deliberately mislead his/her audience. But would it be wrong to produce an image of a landscape that was enhanced to show the mood the photographer wanted to capture.  

Assignment 3 - Monochrome

Here are the images that I submitted for my third assignment.

Flower photography

I focused on the theme of flowers for my third assignment of this course.

A flower is a flower.  How do you shoot a flower?  How do you shoot an interesting picture of a flower? 

As part of my research I looked at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Imogen Cunningham.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I first came across Mapplethorpe in Graham Clarke's book The Photograph.  The book discusses the portraits of  Mapplethorpe and his exploration of portraiture from a homosexual perspective.  His self portrait series looks at themes like self-identity, sexuality and the public and private self. 

Having this as my first introduction to the artist, I was surprised to see his flowers series.  However, I must say that his delicate treatment of flowers was a refreshing change to the habitual macro shots you tend to see everywhere from flickr to discount print stores.  

I particularly liked the freshness of his work with flowers, the way in which his simple arrangements tends to give a greater air of importance to his subject.  His use of light is very effective and breathes life into the flowers.  

http://www.mapplethorpe.org/portfolios/flowers/

Imogen Cunningham

As my assignment was based on the creative effects of monochrome I found Cunningham's work highly relevant.  Her interest in botanical photography including her in depth study of the magnolia flower are very inspiring.  

The black and white medium definitely highlights the graphical qualities of shape, form and texture.  Her images are clutter free and with the use of light she brings out the textural characteristics of her subjects.  

http://www.photoliaison.com/imogen_cunningham/Imogen_Cunningham.htm

http://www.imogencunningham.com/

The Nature of Photographs

As part of this course I have visited a number of exhibitions.  From these visits I have identified a need to learn more about how to interpret and read photographs and pictures.  Stephen Shore’s The Nature of Photographs is a very useful book as it has helped me to interpret what I see in front of me when looking at images but has also introduced me to new ways of thinking about exactly what a photograph is. 

Although we often speak of capturing a moment with a camera, I never really thought too deeply about the process of transforming the world in front of us into a photograph until I read this book.  I never really thought so much of my learning on The Art of Photography course as learning how to use the tools that define and interpret content.  Instead I believe I thought of them as skills, but skills are a completely different concern when applied to photography.

Photographs are two dimensional whereas we see the world three dimensionally.  This monocular vision can throw up some frustrating results when shooting but can also provide some interesting outcomes.  For example, in some images the background can have an effect on the foreground.  I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have taken an image which looked fine at the time of shooting only to see that my subject has a tree growing out its head or similar.  Our eyes can distinguish between the foreground and the background but the camera can’t.  This is referred to as a product of photographic vision.

Photographs differ to paintings.  Shore refers to the photographer as being faced with the messiness of the world and imposing order on a scene to create an image.  Painting is very much the opposite.  As photographers it is our job to select and simplify the mess in front of us and transform it into a rectangular image.  This is done by choosing a frame, exposure, vantage point and a plane of focus. 

Shore writes about the visual language that we use when talking about photographs.  I found this section of the book very relevant to me and the stage at which I am at on my work. 

The Depictive level

The formal character of an image is a range of optical and physical factors which define the physical level of the photograph.  The four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photographic image are:

1.       Flatness. 

As I mentioned earlier photographs are monocular.  When we look at the picture plane (field the lens’ image is projected) we choose a variety of ways in which to add depth or the illusion of depth to our images.  For example, aperture – depth of field and shallow focus.  Some images are opaque and some are transparent.

2.       Frame

Photographs have edges whilst the world doesn’t.  These edges create relationships between the lines and shapes of the image.  The frame can be passive or active.  An active frame where the frame works inward and draws the viewer in.  Passive usually relates to the subject working out of the frame.

3.       Time

Not just shutter speed but more so the static nature of the photograph.  The world keeps moving but the camera provides a static image of this moving world. We can look at time under the headings of Frozen time, Extrusive time and still time.

4.       Focus

The camera sees monocularly from a particular vantage point.  It creates a hierarchy in the depictive space by defining a single plane of focus which is parallel to the picture.  The spatial hierarchy can be removed only by photographing a flat subject parallel to the picture plane.  This is why we get distortion in our images which is something we don’t see without eyes.

I have noticed that I see my pictures and the pictures of others differently since I invested in this book.  The next section in the book is the Mental level and I plan to move onto that shortly.  

Exercise: Colours into tones 2

The aim of this is to use channel adjustment to create a specific effect.

I chose a sheep in a field for this shot as this is the type of garden I grew up with.  I thought it would be interesting to move away from the stereotypical images of flowers for this shot.  The green is light in colour.

Original

Grayscale

Adjustments made to the yellow and green slider and the blacks slider to bring out more of the darks in the sheep.  I think the differences between the grayscale image and the conversion using the colour sliders is not as dramatic as I would have anticipated.  However, I do like the low key type effect and how the colour removed from the background makes the sheep stand out more.  

Exercise: Colours into tones 1

For this exercise I had to use an image that had strong contrasting colours and use the channel sliders in Photoshop to create two opposite versions of the image in black and white.

The original image had green and red as the contrasting colours.

Original image

For this image I darkened the greens and lightened the reds.  

In this image I did the reverse and lightened the greens and darkened the reds.  

These images demonstrate the effects of adjusting the contrasting colours for an extreme conversion.  

However, to look at the effects of extreme conversion I have also looked at the following images with the colours red and yellow. I think the effects can be seen more clearly with this composition and colour palette.

Original colour version

Decreased red and increased yellow

Darkened reds and lightened yellow

Exercise: Strength of interpretation

For this exercise I had to look at working with the tonal range.  I had to find 2 images that would suit the following:

• A strong increase in contrast that will include clipping in at least the shadow areas.  
• Low key or high key treatment in which the entire brightness range is shifted up or down. 

The first image is of the London Eye on a sunny day.  There is quite a lot of contrast in the image as it stands however when I apply an S-curve to the image the colour of the sky is not very pleasing.  It looks fake.  When converted to black and white it looks better as the colour is not an issue and the viewer can focus on the shape of the clouds which is otherwise overlooked by the bright colour.  

Original Image

S curve applied to the tone curve

Black and white

For the second image I chose a bike with passers-by in the city.  

Original

High key colour

High and white

Again the colour image is not very pleasing with the colours looking bleached out and weak.  However the black and white conversion which I preformed using a preset in Lightroom works well and places the emphasis and focus on the bike and couple walking by.  

The shape of the bike was very distinctive and the black and white conversion embraces this and accentuates the form and lines and movement in the image.  These are graphic qualities that are suitable for black and white conversions.  

I knew from experience that a black and white conversion of the London Eye would work too because of the clouds and the blueness of the sky.  Black and white tends to bring our the richness of the tones in skies like this.  Good black and white pictures nearly always have a pure white and a pure black.