John Suler's PhotoPsychology
Photographic Psychology: Image “Manipulation”
With the invention of photography came a debate: is a photograph an accurate record of some real event, or is it an artistic interpretation? Now that photography is almost 200 years old, most people will agree that it can be both. Nevertheless, some of the controversies about manipulating an image have been intense, especially in photojournalism where the professional’s job is to capture reality as accurately as possible. Faking images can ruin your career, as it almost did to Arthur Rothstein, a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the American Dust Bowl era, who was accused of fraud because he moved a steer skull he found on a parched South Dakota pasture ten feet in order to compose a shot.
Fortunately, those of us who aren’t photojournalists don’t have to worry about such controversies. We’re not going to cut and paste a Supreme Court Justice into a shot of a Pro-Life Rally, unless we do it as a joke. But we will experience more subtle manifestations of that century old debate, especially when we work in those gray areas between realism and artistic interpretation. How much should I enhance the color of her eyes, or that sunset? If I remove that telephone pole coming out of Aunt Martha’s head, why not also take that nasty looking mole off her cheek, or at least minimize how the side-lighting makes it look like Mount Everest.
Criticisms of such actions sometimes stem from a prejudice against image editing computer programs. It’s fake manipulation, not real photography. Some photography contests won’t permit such post-processing. If the purpose of the contest is to test your skill in handling the camera, that’s one thing. But sometimes the restrictions are based on rather misguided or outdated notions of what “real” photography is.
The critics seem to forget that Ansel Adams spent hours in the darkroom fine-tuning his exposures. Or that digital cameras create a jpeg by running the raw data from the sensor through a proprietary algorithm. Technically speaking, isn’t that post-processing too?
The truth of the matter is that there is no one “reality” to capture in an image. Photographers select a reality by shooting this particular scene, and not that one. They shape that reality by using different cameras, lens, filters, film, aperture and shutter speed settings, dark room and Photoshop techniques. Even the hardcore, objective photojournalist might wonder whether to kneel down to shoot that military leader, in order to enhance his size and prominence, or shoot him from above to make him look short.
Did you ever notice how people can appear very different depending on the light, the colors around them, the angle from which you are viewing them, and very subtle changes in his or her body language and facial expression? Which is the “real” person? Which do you want to capture in a photograph, and what photographic tools and techniques will help you do that? Worrying about whether your effort involves too much “manipulation” will not help you answer these questions.
The eye adapts. What it considers normal or manipulated depends on what it’s used to. Work on a manipulated image long enough and it starts to look rather normal. If you look at a lot of surrealistic images and then switch to a realistic one, it will appear a little odd, maybe even unnaturally dull and lifeless. In the image above, the subject on the left appears quite normal. Upon closer inspection, you might see that her image is not normal at all, but a stylized watercolor effect. She only looks normal in the context of the other more unusually manipulated subjects. I showed my wife another photo that I had altered a lot in Photoshop and intended to use as the image to accompany this essay. My wife said, “But it doesn’t look manipulated.”
In the final analysis, we have no choice but to manipulate an image in some way, shape, or form, either inside the camera or out – the distinction is quite arbitrary. So if you like the manipulation, if it expresses something you want to say, if it serves that artistic construction of reality that we call “composition” – then ignore the critics and do it.
* This image and essay are part of a book on Photographic Psychology that I’m writing within Flickr. Please see the set description.
Photographic Psychology: Image “Manipulation”
With the invention of photography came a debate: is a photograph an accurate record of some real event, or is it an artistic interpretation? Now that photography is almost 200 years old, most people will agree that it can be both. Nevertheless, some of the controversies about manipulating an image have been intense, especially in photojournalism where the professional’s job is to capture reality as accurately as possible. Faking images can ruin your career, as it almost did to Arthur Rothstein, a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the American Dust Bowl era, who was accused of fraud because he moved a steer skull he found on a parched South Dakota pasture ten feet in order to compose a shot.
Fortunately, those of us who aren’t photojournalists don’t have to worry about such controversies. We’re not going to cut and paste a Supreme Court Justice into a shot of a Pro-Life Rally, unless we do it as a joke. But we will experience more subtle manifestations of that century old debate, especially when we work in those gray areas between realism and artistic interpretation. How much should I enhance the color of her eyes, or that sunset? If I remove that telephone pole coming out of Aunt Martha’s head, why not also take that nasty looking mole off her cheek, or at least minimize how the side-lighting makes it look like Mount Everest.
Criticisms of such actions sometimes stem from a prejudice against image editing computer programs. It’s fake manipulation, not real photography. Some photography contests won’t permit such post-processing. If the purpose of the contest is to test your skill in handling the camera, that’s one thing. But sometimes the restrictions are based on rather misguided or outdated notions of what “real” photography is.
The critics seem to forget that Ansel Adams spent hours in the darkroom fine-tuning his exposures. Or that digital cameras create a jpeg by running the raw data from the sensor through a proprietary algorithm. Technically speaking, isn’t that post-processing too?
The truth of the matter is that there is no one “reality” to capture in an image. Photographers select a reality by shooting this particular scene, and not that one. They shape that reality by using different cameras, lens, filters, film, aperture and shutter speed settings, dark room and Photoshop techniques. Even the hardcore, objective photojournalist might wonder whether to kneel down to shoot that military leader, in order to enhance his size and prominence, or shoot him from above to make him look short.
Did you ever notice how people can appear very different depending on the light, the colors around them, the angle from which you are viewing them, and very subtle changes in his or her body language and facial expression? Which is the “real” person? Which do you want to capture in a photograph, and what photographic tools and techniques will help you do that? Worrying about whether your effort involves too much “manipulation” will not help you answer these questions.
The eye adapts. What it considers normal or manipulated depends on what it’s used to. Work on a manipulated image long enough and it starts to look rather normal. If you look at a lot of surrealistic images and then switch to a realistic one, it will appear a little odd, maybe even unnaturally dull and lifeless. In the image above, the subject on the left appears quite normal. Upon closer inspection, you might see that her image is not normal at all, but a stylized watercolor effect. She only looks normal in the context of the other more unusually manipulated subjects. I showed my wife another photo that I had altered a lot in Photoshop and intended to use as the image to accompany this essay. My wife said, “But it doesn’t look manipulated.”
In the final analysis, we have no choice but to manipulate an image in some way, shape, or form, either inside the camera or out – the distinction is quite arbitrary. So if you like the manipulation, if it expresses something you want to say, if it serves that artistic construction of reality that we call “composition” – then ignore the critics and do it.
* This image and essay are part of a book on Photographic Psychology that I’m writing within Flickr. Please see the set description.