Monday - June 04, 2007

Photo Manipulation

We hear all the time that digital photography isn't real photography, photoshop is cheating, blah blah blah. I was watching a documentary about Marti Friedlander the other day (which by the way was a really cool documentary, I do really like a lot of her work) and she was saying about how she used to work as a fashion photographer retoucher back in the 50s cleaning up spots on faces and slimming down thighs! I screamed to Dennis is the other room - WOW! They did the same thing back then, but with out computers! He called back - Duh! 

So now that we all know who the real photographic guru is in the house... I will give everyone a quick history lesson in the art of photo manipulation. 

"Before computers, photo editing was done by retouching with ink, paint, double-exposure, piecing photos or negatives together in the darkroom or scratching Polaroids. Photo editing is as old as photography itself; the idea of a photo having inherent verisimilitude is a social construct." - wikipedia

So really, retouching photos isn't anything new at all (though probably much easier now). Also another thing that photographers do these days in Photoshop is bring out certain things in the photo (the background, eyes, etc) or change the colour of the photo. What I also found out from my personal photography Encyclopedia (Dennis) is that process is nothing new either! They used to do the same thing when they printed photographs - called "dodging and burning". 

"Dodging and burning are terms used in photography for a technique used during the printing process to manipulate the exposure of a photographic print. Dodging reduces the exposure for areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter, while burning gives extra exposure to areas of the print that he or she wishes to be darker." -wikipedia

Ansel Adams actually made this process an art form. He even developed his own chemistry to be able to control the way shadows and highlights develop in the processing of his film.

So next time anyone says that digital photography and photo manipulation is cheating you can give them a wee history lesson of your own!

... I have to give a little caveat here... We (especially Dennis) absolutely love the "realness" of film. Some kids (and photographers) these days haven't ever even used a film camera before - which we think is unfortunate. There is something to be said about the beautifully simple process of light hitting film - creating a perfectly negative likeness of a scene frozen in time. Dennis is absolutely obsessed with it and salivates constantly over more film cameras he wants to buy. We LOVE our Canon digital system - it allows us to shoot like crazy - but we LOVE the film cameras as well - there are certain qualities that are inherent in different types of film that you just can't get in a digital camera. 

So our business is a marriage of art and technology. :)