Quite some years ago when I was doing my Fine Art Degree at University I was working on an image which I wasn’t quite sure about. My tutor came over and asked what was wrong. I told him that I thought people wouldn’t like one aspect of it. He looked at me and said, “It’s your image, you can do anything you like to it.” Ever since then I keep repeating those words to myself.
via It's Your Image Do What you Like to it.
Interesting article and also an interesting set of comments.
The article focuses on processing of images and whether or not certain types of processing would meet with the approval of certain types of people. My wife likes to paint from time to time and a while ago I was in Montreal and she wanted me to get her some painting supplies. I checked around and found a store close to my hotel. While I was getting her stuff I got talking to the woman in the shop. I told her that I had once tried painting, but that my attempts were almost universally ridiculed by my family even though I quite liked the result. I had painted a horse with woods in the background. I liked the way the woods came out, and most of the horse. However, I’ll be the first to admit that one of the rear legs of the horse was somewhat ‘off’. But, I thought, not bad for a first attempt. My family apparently didn’t think so and I can still hear their mocking laughter today. I never tried painting again! The woman in the store essentially said that you don’t paint for other people. You paint for yourself. I’ve taken this lesson to heart with my photography. I do it for me, not for other people and I don’t really care too much what others think. Actually that’s not entirely true. I welcome constructive criticism, especially from those whose opinions I respect because it makes my work better. I think this article is saying the same thing.
The comments, while generally agreeing with the article, take the discussion in a different direction: If a photograph is substantially enhanced through post-processing is it still a photograph. Or is it, as some of the comments suggest, “digital art”? To me it’s still a photograph. Photographers have always enhanced their photographs through post-processing even in the days of film. The pictorialist photographers did a lot to their images to make them look like paintings and even Ansel Adams manipulated (if that’s the right word. It sounds too negative.) his negatives and prints to get them to realize the vision he had when he pressed the shutter release. I probably spend more time processing an image than I do taking it. When I take a picture I have a particular result in mind. Sometimes, rarely, I get this right out of the camera. More often than not I have to ‘tweak’ it to get the result I had in mind when I took the picture. I think I soured of photography at one point because, unlike Adams, I never learned how to develop my own negatives and make my own prints. This meant that I was at the mercy of commercial labs, which generally produced results, which I could not match with the idea I had in my head of what my picture would look like. Essentially I couldn’t control the entire process. Now, in the digital world, I can – at least up to a point. I don’t often print my photographs, but when I do I have to rely on a lab. One day I’ll get a better printer, understand better how printer profiles work and be able to get prints, which match the vision I had when I pressed the shutter release. Then I’ll only have to learn how to matte and frame the prints.
I suppose that is my ultimate goal – to be able to control the entire process from pressing the shutter release to viewing a print on the wall. I didn’t realize I was such a control freak.
One final thought. If you look for a definition of photography you tend to come up with something like ‘the art or practice of taking and processing photographs’. It would be wise not to forget that the word originally meant ‘drawing with light’. Under that definition both traditional approaches and “digital art” would both be considered to be photography.
