Realism
 

"The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention" Francis Bacon.
How realistic do you make your prints?

A good question! I have to say that, superficially, I ignore realism. I make black and white prints of coloured subjects, for a start...
But there is an inner realism. Dealing with this is perhaps the reason I feel compelled to make photographs.


Alan

I strive not to misrepresent, I want to show what I see. But that may in some cases not be what is actually there, it might be something that is missing.

With black and white realism goes out of the window, B/W is 1 step removed from reality as we live in a world full of colour, When I press the shutter button I have an idea of how I see the finished print and I strive to get that in the finished print, and I would say that 90% of the time I get there, but for the rest things change when I see the negative on the base board, but that is my Reality, the way I see things
Richard

The "reality" of a monochrome image became so deeply embedded in the earliest decades of photography (the pre-colour stage), that even now it remains a cultural convention. That affects discussion of realism in photography.

The question's too complicated, therefore, for this old brain!

A good question - I tend to print pretty straight-forwardly - what is on the negative is what gets printed, and these days there seems to be very little dodging and burning. OK, I'll resort to a bit of pot-ferry every now and then, and prints I'm happy with get toned . . I suppose they are realistic, but realistic to what is on the negative, which is in itself just a version of what was in front of me at the time.
The moment you hit that shutter I think you sort of leave reality behind.

I rather like this quote by Wynn Bullock:

"The medium of photography can record not only what the eyes see, but that which the mind's eye sees as well. The camera is not only an extension of the eye, but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye, visible." :)

I think the quotation is more analogous with a Zen like modus operandi. In photography, be it taking or printing and is not necessarily related to realism in print making.

I am still learning how to dodge and burn. Most of my prints in which I dodge some parts of the photo are not very clearly different. During my last darkroom session, I made a 40 second exposure at f/16 with constant dodging the shadows; but it looked similar to a 20 second at f/11. Maybe only a slight increase of detail in the shadows.

Ansel's print of Moonrise over Hernandez would be an example of pulling what he saw from the negative through printing. Far from realism but what he printed was what he visualized upon taking the photograph.

I have read about visualizing the scene before pressing the shutter-release button, but have to really put it in practice. Because, most of the time, either I or the subject are in a hurry to get the photo done; and so I tend to just shoot in Program mode. When I want some bokeh, then I adjust my aperture to the biggest one my lens can muster and shoot. Lately, I shot a whole roll in red filter. I've developed the negative, but have not done any prints yet. Would that also be an example of going against realism?

Sorry if I babble.

Being naive about such things, I've often wondered what is more real: a B&W image of a scene or its color variation? B&W deals with light intensity in the film's range. Color film attempts to mimic what most, but not all, of us see in a scene. And what we see is our mind/eye interpretation. So which is more real: light intensity or what we visualize as a color?

[QUOTE=Phil;103013]A good question - I tend to print pretty straight-forwardly - what is on the negative is what gets printed, and these days there seems to be very little dodging and burning. OK, I'll resort to a bit of pot-ferry every now and then, and prints I'm happy with get toned . . I suppose they are realistic, but realistic to what is on the negative, which is in itself just a version of what was in front of me at the time.
The moment you hit that shutter I think you sort of leave reality behind.

That is what I attempt to do, keep the print "honest". Do you think that people "believe" photographs nowadays? Can the general public perceive the difference between a photograph that is a close representation of what the photographer saw or in this digital age do people think that all photographs have been extensively manipulated?