Photomanipulations ?

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

Using the arguments stated..Photograph or digital??

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

Photograph or Digital??

joan warburton 18 Jan 2005

First one: The sky doesn't belong there so I'd say digital.

They're both photos so I'd say it's a photograph.

There lies the dilemma, LoL!

I would say the second two are definitely digital.

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

These are all photographs.. They were done in a enlarger ,some up to 6 enlargers were used.They are all from black and white negatives. This can now all be done with the computer. Does this make them any less a photograph if done the same way in the computer...I don't think so... Just a different tool used in the creation of a photograph. Same End results..By the way, these incredible photographs were all done by the Master Photographer,Jerry Uelsmann who has been doing photography for over 30 years and has permanent collections in a major number of art and Photo museums around the U.S and World. He is also a Professor of Photography at the University of Gainesville,Florida and was a good friend of Ansel Adams..

joan warburton 18 Jan 2005

Thank you so much, Gary, for taking the time to walk thru this whole issue. The field is still so new and I think, rather than set guidelines, all of the work will eventually be accepted as photographs providing the original image was "born in a camera".

Right now, the purest does not know what to make of the digital photographer and like everything else, change is based on knowledge. Thanks again.

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

Ansel Adams is best known for his precision Zone exposure and development system to produce near perfect negatives and prints, along with his meticulous insistence on perfection. Yet he achieved what is probably his most famous photograph in a very hap-hazard manner! Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico was taken without time to meter the scene and, because he was unsure of the exposure, Ansel then had to guess at the proper development time. The result was a negative that was very underexposed in the foreground and very overexposed in the sky, and required extensive dodging and burning to achieve a good print. If some of the above arguments about using gamma,sharpening,or anything after scanning it in is used from the computer makes a photograph no longer a photo but digital. THen the below Ansel Adams photo would fall in the digital argument,but it is clearly a photograph that was heavily manipulated to get the end result you see here. All one has to do is get a copy of Ansel Adams book the making of 40 photographs and you will see the true before and after versions of Moonrise over Hernandez New Mexico. One of Ansels most popular all time Images.

Manipulations of photographs are nothing new: Concerned over digital manipulation to create a photo that is not true reality? Well, this is nothing new. Photographers have long been manipulating prints. Pioneer photographer William H. Jackson and others of his time frequently scratched in objecys in their photos, such as smoke for a steam locomotive, or even an entire train in advertising photos for the railroads when there was not one in the original image. Another trick was to paste on a cardboard cutout of a silhouetted coyotte howling against the moon, and make a copy negative.

And when enlargers first became available, traditional photograpers howled at the possibility of manipulation from cropping a negative.

Have you ever noticed old family photos where the wife or husband was noticeable younger than the other? In that era (turn of the 20th century) photography was not as common as today, and many times a couple would never get their portrait taken while both spouces were alive. If the wife wanted a portrait with her husband after he had died, an earlier portrait of him might be pasted on a new image of the wife and copied, producing a family portrait of the two together.

What would Ansel have thought of digital? Actually, he probably would have embraced it enthusiastically! Although Ansel Adams was very much a photography purist, we must remember that he died in 1984 before the common use of computer programs to correct and manipulate photos. However, Ansel liked new technology. He experimented heavily with the new Polaroid instant film in the late 1940s; and used a microwave oven to quickly dry test prints. Since Ansels main concerns were for the finished print and the great amount of time he had to spend in the darkroom laboriously dodging and burning-in each print he made, he would probably have welcomed any new tool that could make his life easier, such as the use of digital technology to correct flaws and adjust contrast ranges in his photographs.

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

Your welcome Joan, History has a long list of naysayers about the next new procedure etc. Rather than try to pigeon hole it in categories , one should embrace them and use them for the final end result,which is the art vision that the artist is striving to create.There is a line where you can take a photograph over the line and it pretty much no longer resembles the photographic image,but the arguements presented above mostly decry the use of basic everyday digital tools that one could duplicate on the enlarger. That is where I was just trying to open up the vision so newbies to the field would not get confused by misinformation on certain digial tools that by using them suddenly make the photograph no longer a photograph. If one subscribed to some of the above arguments, then all the examples I showed would fall under digital art. When in fact they are not. THis is a by far bigger arena for debate as this field of digital and it's impac on photography has the purist(and there is nothing wrong with being in the purist group or the other) and the more experimental groups in much debate over this. But if you look at the history of Photography it has always been so and probably will always be... I think we you go beyond what you can do with traditional darkroom techniques than you start to go into digital grouping, If you do the same things in the computer that you can do in the traditional darkroom it is digital photography in that you are using a digital tool to achieve it,but it is still more or less a photograph or in that realm.

Gary Glass 18 Jan 2005

Now here is a example of a photo I would feel goes beyond a photograph and enters in the realm of digital because you would not be able to duplicate this in a tradional darkroom to this degree.When you use corel or digital filters that mimic charcoal,pencil,watercolor etc then I think it has now gone past being a photograph.