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  #11  
Old 9th May 2014, 10:23 AM
Peter T Peter T is offline
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There is nothing new with the manipulation of photographic images. It has been going on for at least 100 years. I suggest you try to find the book “South with Endurance” featuring more than 100 pages of superb photos by Frank Hurley of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17. Hurley was a master of manipulation by combining negatives to improve a picture. This was not to deceive or to alter history but to make a dull scene more attractive or to add weight to an event. A good before and after example is on pages 210-211 and there are other examples in the book. For today’s photographers this book is a reality check when you see details of Hurley’s camera equipment, film, plates etc, and the conditions he had to work in.
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  #12  
Old 9th May 2014, 11:18 AM
verene verene is offline
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Argentique? I often see this as a reference for darkroom stuff and that's the name of the thread in the french equivalent of this forum. And here is one blog about street photography using film: http://www.eschon.com/largentique-un...-photo-de-rue/. Try google.fr and the search terms of 'photo de rue argentique' and you will see what I mean. And yes i would say that anyone I know who speaks French does differentiate between digital or not.
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  #13  
Old 9th May 2014, 04:40 PM
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Argentum Argentum is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by verene View Post
Argentique? I often see this as a reference for darkroom stuff and that's the name of the thread in the french equivalent of this forum. And here is one blog about street photography using film: http://www.eschon.com/largentique-un...-photo-de-rue/. Try google.fr and the search terms of 'photo de rue argentique' and you will see what I mean. And yes i would say that anyone I know who speaks French does differentiate between digital or not.
Well here's a pressing question, what do the French think the word Giclée means, is it used in France and does it have a slang meaning ?
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  #14  
Old 9th May 2014, 05:17 PM
DavidH DavidH is offline
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To answer your original question, I don't think there's anything wrong with your description. It simply derives from your opinion of what is a photograph and what isn't. The fact that some will agree with you and others won't doesn't mean you have to bow to some form of political correctness.
It's true to say that most prints are in some way manipulated. You can even say that attaching a yellow filter to give a bit more detail to a sky is manipulation. It doesn't alter the fact that you are "writing with light" which is what the word means.
The problem with digital manipulation is that it seems so commonly overdone that I find myself looking at the manipulation rather than the photograph. Because the hundreds of such pictures that I have seen look so similar to me, I find them trite, unimaginative and boring. You could argue that what you do on a computer isn't writing with light, but darkroom work certainly is.
I find that my main criterion is that my attention is on the picture and not what has been done to achieve the effect, and in the great majority of cases a normal darkroom print conforms to my idea.
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  #15  
Old 9th May 2014, 05:26 PM
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Argentum Argentum is offline
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Originally Posted by DavidH View Post
To answer your original question, I don't think there's anything wrong with your description. It simply derives from your opinion of what is a photograph and what isn't. The fact that some will agree with you and others won't doesn't mean you have to bow to some form of political correctness.
It's true to say that most prints are in some way manipulated. You can even say that attaching a yellow filter to give a bit more detail to a sky is manipulation. It doesn't alter the fact that you are "writing with light" which is what the word means.
The problem with digital manipulation is that it seems so commonly overdone that I find myself looking at the manipulation rather than the photograph. Because the hundreds of such pictures that I have seen look so similar to me, I find them trite, unimaginative and boring. You could argue that what you do on a computer isn't writing with light, but darkroom work certainly is.
I find that my main criterion is that my attention is on the picture and not what has been done to achieve the effect, and in the great majority of cases a normal darkroom print conforms to my idea.
Well suppose you consider that what see is the image drawn with light through the lens in our eye onto our retina, so infact everything we see is a photograph whether made with a camera or just some object we look at.
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  #16  
Old 9th May 2014, 05:29 PM
big paul big paul is offline
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well said David,,, could not have put it better myself ....





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  #17  
Old 9th May 2014, 05:30 PM
DavidH DavidH is offline
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Wow - that's getting a bit esoteric!
I think I prefer to make a distinction between the transient perception of light and actually recording it.
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  #18  
Old 9th May 2014, 06:48 PM
JOReynolds JOReynolds is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Argentum View Post
Well here's a pressing question, what do the French think the word Giclée means, is it used in France and does it have a slang meaning ?
The French word Giclée is used internationally in the world of flat artwork to mean a digitally-printed reproduction, or inkjet print. The weighty Oxford Hachette dictionary translates the feminine noun into English as a 'squirt' or a 'spurt'. The verb Gicler can mean 'to spray'.
The first limited-edition fine-art ink-jet reproductions were made in the 1980s on the Scitex Iris inkjet proofing printer (thus the erstwhile name Iris Prints) but the inks, intended to mimic the colours used in CMYK photomechanical printing, had a reputation for rapid fading in daylight.
I asked two French neighbours if the word had an alternative slang ('argot') meaning and they didn't think so. But this is the rural south-west, nearly a thousand kilometres from the sophistication of Paris.
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  #19  
Old 10th May 2014, 03:23 PM
JamesK JamesK is offline
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The key thing about true photographs made exclusively from light sensitive materials is that they have no virtual dimension. As a consequence their authority to describe subject matter comes not from resemblance but from direct physical causation. That makes them real in ways that methods which assemble pictures out of processed data can't match.
Firstly, I think the first two sentences of the above statement by Maris are probably the most eloquent and incisive description of the nature of photography I've ever read.

However, I don't agree with the last part, which appears to have been added since I first read the original quote in another post.

Whether you're developing film in a darkroom or working with a digital image in a computer you're still “processing data”. The original image – film or digital – is caused by direct physical causation, that is, by light hitting either a photosensitive chemical compound (emulsion) or a photosensitive electronic device (CCD, etc.). I fail to see why the veracity of a photographic image is dependent on the medium on which it is captured.

What Maris appears to imply is that by “re-photographing” the original image to make a print that we're preserving or enhancing the veracity of it simply by photographing it again. (Added "photographicness”?)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Maris View Post
There is a one to one correspondence between points in a true photograph and places in real-world subject matter. This is not true of paintings, drawings, or digi-graphs and that's why it is prudent to believe in them less.
While film photographs may “resist” discretionary editing or augmentation, they're in no way immune to it. As paintings or drawings are a complete fabrication in the first place, it is perhaps more correct to say that they are from the start created to give a particular representation rather than created and then subsequently manipulated in order to do this.

The ease with which a medium can be manipulated should in no way detract from it's inherent veracity: it's people who perpetrate frauds, not machines.

As for “digi-graphs”, there's no such thing: like it or not, digital cameras capture light in exactly the same way as a film camera, so they're just a much a photograph as if the light were recorded on film. It's still painting with light, but with a different kind of paint.

(I wonder if, in the days of glass plates, that pictures from the then new-fangled roll film were disparagingly referred to as “roll-graphs”?)

To reiterate, I have to say again that no one photographic medium is inherently more “real” than the other.

The camera never lies? Perhaps this was a typographical error, the original statement being “the camera forever lies”, passing off, as it does, a static, two-dimensional representation as “reality”.

Lets be honest here, this is merely the old “film is better than digital” argument, with the morality of film being considered superior to digital. If that isn't a conceited, arrogant attitude in itself, then I don't know what is.

Perhaps now that digital is starting to better film in technical respects, the moral argument is the only one left, although trying to argue that a piece of chemically-sensitised plastic is morally superior to a light-sensitive semiconductor device (or vice-versa) is frankly ludicrous.

I got back into film photography as, at the time, it was superior to digital in terms of resolution and the like. As soon as this was no longer the case, I went out and bought a DSLR which, to be honest, gives far better results than I ever got from 35mm and even gives scanned roll film a run for it's money.

Whether or not I'm morally inferior because of this is not something I lose any sleep over.
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  #20  
Old 10th May 2014, 04:38 PM
big paul big paul is offline
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that's what I like about this website its in the name FILM AND DARKROOM. so if you feel that digital is better than film ,you must be on the wrong website ,it is obvious that people on this site will criticise digital and support film ,my personal opinion is that I cannot stand anything digital ,digital cameras ,computers, and printers.
so lets be proud of what we do ,




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