Posted by Dan Truong on August 23, 2006 at 3:23 AM
I like the 1st part of his speech.
The 2nd part IMHO he might miss the point:
If there's no difficulty in recreating a percieved reality via darkroom work, there is no artistic expression: It is not the destination that matters but the journey.
That creates extremes where painters can frame a uniform red color painting or what not, with a long laius about why they did it.
With that same philosophy maybe those photographers believe that if digital manipulation is too easy, there will be no thought nor skill involved in the creation, therefore relegating nature photography from art form to product.
The same issue between modern autofocus SLRs vs fully manual cameras with no meter.
At that point to up the difficulty level one notch up, making surealistic or building purely fictional scenes will become a must in the digital darkroom, and plain photo will be kid's play.
Well, to sum it up, digital darkrooms will make skillfull photographers trying to follow Ansel obsolete, and of course they'll complain, like anyone who's skillset goes into the closet.
The problem is that realistic photography will turn to comodity, because it'll be so easy to get it right every time, so true expression will have to up the anty.
Example:
You take pride on a photo taken at the right time for a gorgeous sunset, moving all human artefacts out of the frame, etc. You show it to someone who goes BFD, so what? Goes to the same spot at noon, snaps a lousy pic, pops it in the computer and uses the "sunsetize" filter, and turns his photo into something as nice in 3 clicks. Now what about your moment, your photo, etc? Doesn't that suck?
Discussion
1 replies"Photographing The Art of Nature"
-PB
The 2nd part IMHO he might miss the point:
If there's no difficulty in recreating a percieved reality via darkroom work, there is no artistic expression: It is not the destination that matters but the journey.
That creates extremes where painters can frame a uniform red color painting or what not, with a long laius about why they did it.
With that same philosophy maybe those photographers believe that if digital manipulation is too easy, there will be no thought nor skill involved in the creation, therefore relegating nature photography from art form to product.
The same issue between modern autofocus SLRs vs fully manual cameras with no meter.
At that point to up the difficulty level one notch up, making surealistic or building purely fictional scenes will become a must in the digital darkroom, and plain photo will be kid's play.
Well, to sum it up, digital darkrooms will make skillfull photographers trying to follow Ansel obsolete, and of course they'll complain, like anyone who's skillset goes into the closet.
The problem is that realistic photography will turn to comodity, because it'll be so easy to get it right every time, so true expression will have to up the anty.
Example:
You take pride on a photo taken at the right time for a gorgeous sunset, moving all human artefacts out of the frame, etc. You show it to someone who goes BFD, so what? Goes to the same spot at noon, snaps a lousy pic, pops it in the computer and uses the "sunsetize" filter, and turns his photo into something as nice in 3 clicks. Now what about your moment, your photo, etc? Doesn't that suck?