Green splashI often read about
untouched photos just like if it was an important thing and also just like if manipulated images were borned with digital photography.
I just wonder what it can mean in writer's mind and how they can beleive that such images exist. If they refer to images done in camera only by focusing and computing exposure they are false. If they think that an untouched photo reflects real colors and tones they are still false.
In the film era, you could change the reality just by film choice and no film can render a scene exactly as it is. Excepted perharps a gray card but that's not the kind of photos i'm the most interested in.
Buy a roll of Velvia 50 film, shoot a landscape at the end of afternoon, process the film with neutral parameters and look at the result. Who can say the slide shows real colors and tones ?
Let stay a little bit with film. There are many ways to change the reality just when processing the film in the wet darkroom. More, some people were real experts to remove some annoying details on prints and even directly on the negs. They could not only remove but also add ...
With digital photography, the less we can say is
what you see is not what you get.
What do you get : raw datas captured by the sensor. If you shoot jpeg you never see them. If you shoot raw you will probably never look at them because an unprocessed raw file is not really beautiful.
What do you see : an image file produced by software processing from the raw datas. The software is the camera firmware if you shoot jpeg or your raw converter if you shoot raw. If you shoot jpeg you influence the processing by changing some camera's parameters like contrast, saturation, etc. When you shoot raw you do that when you process the raw file.
And what's the importance of
real colors ? Two people in front of the same scene probably wont see the same colors. I really think that it's more important to obtain a pleasant result than to try to show the exact reality.
If you look at
this old post you can read that colors in the image are unprocessed. It just means that i didn't change anything to the default colors parameters of my raw converter but the most important thing about this image is that it's not a real scene. If you were there with me, never your eyes would have seen such colors. It's just a fake due to the long exposure time combined with dusk light. A fake but a natural photographic and atmospheric effect.
So, how do i make my landscapes ?
With my camera :- I compose the scene. If i see a plastic bag on the beach i remove it. It's easier and faster than removing it with the clone tool of a photo editor but it's still a trick.
- I use all the tools i know to obtain a sharp result : tripod, remote controler, mirror lockup, etc.
- I compute the exposure not to obtain a definitive image but to capture all the dynamic range of the scene and to optimize the signal/noise ratio.
If the dynamic range is too large, i use GND filters or capture many exposures.
In the digital darkroom : I mostly play with tones curves and saturation and i also use masks to apply these tools with different settings on different parts of the image.
Of course, using photoshop to give longer legs to a model is not the same trick that enhancing colors and for me such a manipulated photo is more a digital image than a digital photograph ...
