Annoying Man With A Camera

Well no, not if it's one of my photographs.

There are photography purists who eschew the Phaustian Phrivolity of Photoshop. It must all be done 'in-camera' they shout. Or rather, intone, in hoarse sibilant whispers...

Interesting thing about purists. There are usually some sort of unspoken parameters around the purity that they espouse. So the vegan accepts that their transport to work is probably powered by an engine using oil, diesel or gasoline, all of which have come from the sacrifice, albeit billions of years ago, of millions of tiny animals and plants. All those millions of tiny screams.... Aha - I use a bike I hear you cry - yes, it has bearings that are greased, a chain that you need to oil. But I walk! - yes on tarmac'd pavements, billions of tiny animals, PRESSED into roadways. Now that's not awfully nice, is it?

I'm not really being serious, I don't really have it in for vegans, and life is tough enough for them without us giving them a hard time I think. All that cardboardy stuff they have to eat for starters... Stop Stop STOP.

Apply the same argument to musicians - Maxim Vengerov, astonishingly talented violinist, imagine hearing him warm up in the green room before going on stage to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and saying to him "You shouldn't really need to DO that you know, if you were a real violinist you wouldn't need to practice at all. You should have been able to do it from birth. And by the way, are those GUT strings you're playing on ???"

So back to camera purists - the argument is that you should just get it all right 'in camera' because that's pure art, everything else is fakery and devilment.

So we find the same parameters around the concept - first, you need a camera - well, that's not natural, is it, I mean, were you born with one? if so, my commiserations to your mother that must have been extraordinarily painful for her.

But seriously, modern cameras do tons of stuff for you, set the tone, focus the lens, visualise the world through fluorine coatings to reduce flare, balance the aperture settings, exposure, shutter speed, and compensate for the hand tremors you acquired when you were drinking 7 pints last night.

Landscape photographers often use Neutral Density filters in front of the lens to bring the brightness of the sky down, so the picture is evenly exposed. I would ask, have you ever picked a bunch of Neutral Density filters from the side of the road? Or grown a peck of flash units in your shrubbery? Or perhaps you've hand drawn a condenser microphone on fine parchment paper and clipped it to your camera?

The thing is, back in the day of film cameras, a true photographer was a rare thing, struggling with a technological beast that couldn't even focus on its own, let alone get the lighting and exposure right, and most of us (me included) would use up reams of rolls of film and hardly get a decent shot out of them.

Personally, I'm a bit of a tart, and that is because my Art needs Work. I have shown some of my 'before' pictures here, in previous blogs: Nobody want to look at that stuff, do they?

I'll admit, I've toyed with the fakery of posting something like a close up of a bug, with an accompanying caption saying "I set up this shot to take advantage of the moonlight striking the carapace as the beetle opens its wings for the first time", implying this magic was somehow all planned, when in actual fact the real caption should have read "I took about a million of these, hand held, in my back garden, using high speed continuous shooting with my eyes shut, and blow me, ONE of them came out OK".

I particularly like it, by the way, when someone posts a picture of something with an obvious flaw in it, and then pretends that was part of the composition. "The out of focus grandmother scowling in the background gives a sense of history..." etc etc etc

From my perspective, photoshop is just a continuation of the magic you can make with modern cameras,

Without special astrophotography software like Autostakkert2! (it really is called that) you wouldn't get decent pictures of nebula and constellations at all because the light is so faint - and the technology allows you to stack photos on top of each other and use them to strip away the blurry bits and anomalies - here for example, we have two images of the moon, taken with the same camera and lens combination.

One of the original photos.  Canon 5DSr, 100-400mm lens, teleconverter, 1/250, f14, ISO 640 — One of the original photos. Canon 5DSr, 100-400mm lens, teleconverter, 1/250, f14, ISO 640

The final image.  Stacked from over 300 of the original shots — The final image. Stacked from over 300 of the original shots

Pretty unbelievable, isn't it? Genuinely is taken from the same photo. So there's definitely some good reasons for a little bit of experimentation, I think.

I can understand that photographers sometimes go a little overboard and you get those horrible over saturated photos that remind you of early postcards of Torquay.

And who among us hasn't used photoshop for the odd visual gag....

I have two dogs.  I also don't have hordes of swarming wildebeest outside my back door.  Usually. — I have two dogs. I also don't have hordes of swarming wildebeest outside my back door. Usually.

This particular photo was sent out at Christmas and had several relatives asking me pointedly "How many dogs do you have NOW????" The Wildebeest, not a comment. Well, it is Leeds - as my bank manager in London once said "Leeds.... they have sheep all over the road up there, don't they?" to which I responded - "Not so much, not since we got the wheel..."

So to finish with, two more photos, both of these were taken using a macro lens, and compiled of about 30 photos, with different focus points on the flowers, stacked and merged shamelessly in Photoshop.

Oh the scandal!

Until the next time!