Personal Choice December 5, 2009 at 13:05
I have, over the years, taken pictures for different reasons. My first camera was an old Kodak camera that used 110 film and I got it just before I moved away from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan before going to California in 1986. I mainly used it to take pictures of friends and things around the Air Force Base that I was living on at the time, and around Sault Ste. Marie, which is where my grandmother lives and where I stayed for a week before we eventually drove west.
Up until my 35mm camera in 1994 all of the pictures that I took were of my family and once I got my 35mm I started getting a bit creative. I was infatuated with nature so those were mostly the ones I took, outside of taking pictures of Becky. It’s too bad the internet wasn’t more fully developed at the time because it sure would have saved a lot film while I putzed with technique and style.
I noticed, early on, that there were a certain number of pictures that I was taking that didn’t satisfy any real “artistic” quality that I was shooting for nor did they really convey any real personal message that I was trying to get across in the photo. I would occasionally see something and shoot it or shoot in a particular style that I knew only I would enjoy but it didn’t matter – I wasn’t taking the photo for any real artistic purpose – just my own personal whimsy.
When Jacob and I were at the farmhouse I took the picture below and converted it to HDR just as I had with all the others. Now, here’s the thing about HDR that didn’t concern me when I started this little venture but has slowly caught up to me and it’s a point that I made in an earlier post on the website before I crashed it. HDR is fake. There’s no denying it. If you over do the texture and light settings in whatever HDR program you use then your photos look totally fake – very painted, over texturized, fake. Stunning, yes. But fake nonetheless. You can tell in the photos that I’ve submitted here, in the photos that haven’t made it on here and also in a lot of the other photos that you see.
Here’s the thing, though. With this photo, I kind of don’t care. I REALLY enjoy it as it is and trust me, it’s as fake as they come. Even with all the flaws in it I really like it. It was this last-minute photo that I took while we were getting ready to leave so I didn’t really do anything to set up at all I just really enjoyed the contrast of shadow and light and the perspective of looking down this building. It has absolutely no Photoshop processing to clean up imperfections (and there are many) but I don’t care. It’s just one of those gotta-be-me things.
I am going to have to be honest here Steve, even if you do not like it… This is not fake, not at all. It perplexes me to think that it is fake. You took three photos of inadequate contrast, and combined them to make one with adequate contrast. So how can this photo be any more fake than any other photo ever taken? Just my thoughts…
I know what you mean by fake, Steve. And while this is a stunning photograph, it is, as you say, fake. Meaning, the photo doesn’t look anything like what the scene looked like with your human eye. I prefer to use HDR to make up for the limitations of digital photography and to get the final photo looking like, and maybe slightly better, then how it looked with my own eye. But (if I am reading you right) I don’t care too much for the over-texturized look of heavy HDR photographs, even though they are fun to look at.
After revisiting this photo, I am really struck by the transition from yellow, red and orange to the cold blue I distinctly remember from that morning.
I just wanted to post a photo here for you guys to ponder. This photo is a single RAW, never seen by any HDR software, and all I did was make the basic adjustments allowed in the PS CS4 RAW importer. Let me know what you think…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacobwcrosby/4389613456/