When reality (apparently) isn't enough
Seriously - a lot of work gone into that and is a work of art. The tree on the right however looks very 'unreal' and the sky is the wrong colour. A bit more attention on those details and it might just have paid off as a photo that has had a levels shift to bring out the areas made dark by shooting into the sun
No, it's not 'A' photograph, but rather a digital art creation with the component source material coming from photographs , and it is in the style of advertising imagery. If it is for that purpose, or an artistic reproduction of that style for artistic commentary, then it is successful. But it would not compete with or stand valid comparison with a ' photograph' of child in a front lit poppy field, as that would be something completely different.
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I like it and admire it very much
We just have more tools at our disposal now.
The picture linked by CMW seems a fairly straightforward piece of Photoshop work to hide intrusive features that would detract from the image. There's nothing particularly radical here.
David
PPG: http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/artists/davidtrout
What I have a very strong dislike for, is those who cobble together images which they have taken from the internet and present it as their creation. The worrying thing with technology today, is you can create pictures with decent software without the 'inconvenience' of little things - like owning a camera and knowing how to take photographs.
I was told though that some college and university courses actually teach imaging using only internet sourced images. If that's right, then students could be set up with the notion that it's OK, right from the start,
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I do agree Kseries that all aspects of an image should be our own, not a collection of our own plus miscellaneous royalty-free images from the internet.
I was told though that some college and university courses actually teach imaging using only internet sourced images. If that's right, then students could be set up with the notion that it's OK, right from the start,
I do agree John , but the boundaries are difficult to define.
There is much talk of 'styles' in, let me call it photographic imagery, where a patrticular photographers extreme processing style is admired and often more important than the specific image content. Then processing steps to reproduce the style are published or even automated in photoshop scripts etc. and then 'followers' of the style can reproduce it at a click of a button. So we have the situation where dramtic images are produced puerely automatically (not that I have anything against that if it is what you want to do) and the original image is (hopefully) the photographers but the end product essentially isn't.
That's an extreme example *but* it isn't that different in principle from where we use any of the fancy tools in our favourite programs for image editing and processing.
And I readily concede that as these inventions go, this one is a mild example. Yet this kind of mix and match approach leaves me a little uneasy, even when (as here) the photographer is entirely upfront about what he's done; and indeed (since the thing is called a tutorial) urges others to have a go.
I cannot satisfactorily explain to myself why I should be unhappy about these sorts of confection. After all, I'll happily watch a film like Gravity in the certain knowledge that neither Sandra Bullock nor George Clooney have ever been in Space. I suppose it comes down to wanting a photograph to be 'honest' (however susceptible it may be to varying interpretations), to be rooted in the factual rather than the fictional. To me, the techniques are a shade too close to those used by photographers who deliberately set out to deceive.
It is, to my mind, significantly different to most editing and processing routines -- not perhaps in principle but certainly in degree. It is surely one thing to accentuate the appearance of clouds (to take a mundane example), quite another the import an 'improved' sky.
I guess others will find it hard to agree with this viewpoint. And perhaps 'viewpoint' is a flattering description for something that is almost visceral.
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It will be perhaps a little too chocolate-boxy for some tastes, but it caught my eye. It is part of a 'tutorial', so I read on to see what the photographer had done to achieve his result.
Quite a lot it turns out. All the elements are 'real', but not all were real at the same time. The poppies moreover have been extended to cover an inconvenient road on one side of the picture and equally inconvenient houses on the other. The background is imported, as are the clouds and the girl. The photographer is entirely open about all this.
The photograph seems to invite us to consider it as realism, but it is in fact a thorough confection. I wouldn't have known if the photographer had been less honest, and feel slightly uncomfortable singling him out. He's produced an attractive photograph. But -- and of course this is a long-running debate, intensified many fold since the introduction of digital photography -- when is a photograph no longer truly a photograph. Is Photoshop the modern Pandora's Box?
ChristopherWheelerPhotography