Camera filters..

[RonO]

Asan ex-pro myselffrom the film days - first commercial, then fashion finally industrial photography - I have to agree with pyounger IF YOUR GOAL IS TO LEARN PHOTOGRAPHY, which is what I thought the OP was after doing.- and good on him, he will learn far more following pyoungers advice than he will doing a course in photoshop et al.

I agree that photoshop (and all other such programs) off er a valuable creative edge, but it is NOT photography, that is art (or a painting as pyounger puts it). Not that there is anything wrong with mixing art and photography but as my art teacher used to tell me (I did a Dip AD too), you need to perfect both instruments before combing their power (instruments being referrd to as camera and brush).

In fashion and commercial photography we are all aware of the air-brushing that has always go on to reduce waist-lines and vanish the spots on our beloved celebrities - photography or art? I would say it depends on the degree of change more than 10% air brush is art to me.

 

[^woody^]

All well and good.

But when the OP or anyone else for that matter looks at a picture, do they want to be thinking ... "hmmm yes, 1/320 at f8 AP, ISO 100 plus one stop with a 150mm"

or

"That's a nice photo"

My view is that if Photoshop allows a semi crap photo to be brightened, cropped and sharpened so that it can be put on the wall to admire it, then that is better than staring at a plain wall

 

[ericmark]

^woody^ A1 I could not have put it better.

 

[RonO]

All well and good.

But when the OP or anyone else for that matter looks at a picture, do they want to be thinking ... "hmmm yes, 1/320 at f8 AP, ISO 100 plus one stop with a 150mm"
or
"That's a nice photo"
My view is that if Photoshop allows a semi crap photo to be brightened, cropped and sharpened so that it can be put on the wall to admire it, then that is better than staring at a plain wall

Of course they want to see a 'nice photo' and only an 'anorak' would be wondering what speed or f stop was used and by the same token only an anorak would be thinking I wonder if this and that was done by photoshop. The arguement that myself and Paul Younger are putting forward is very basic. If you want to be a good photographer then learn to do as much as you can to create a 'nice photo' in-camera not with Photoshop.

I have one possible exception, HDR. I have used this technique on a few ocassions when trying to achieve what the camera cannot provide but which is essential to the photograph i.e. taking photos under certain conditions (eg high contrast, strong light) and trying to achieve detail in highlights and shadows. But in using HDR I am in effect combining two or three 'photos' that were correctly exposed for the various sections of the composition.

Of course, when I used to be a pro and did my own printing we would use shading/dodging and burning to achieve this result (not perhaps as accurately as HDR can) but that was the available only available option open to us then.

I am certainly not against photoshop as an artistic means or even for creating the impossible but I do have a problem with it when people over use it, or try to tell me that what they took was 100% natural. And just lets us suppose that you decide to go out one day and photograph a reasonably well known landmark in your area, then decide that it might be fun to photoshop-in Tower Bridge or whatever... fast forward a few hundred years and your 'creation' is the only remaining picture of that long destroyed site. Historians will now think a small lake in a local park had a miniture replica of Tower Bridge spanning it - sounds crazy but when you hear some of the assumptions they make on programmes like Time Team...well, who knows?

 

[ericmark]

Although I can see your point if we really look at pictures where images have been combined one can normally see the errors.

This I hope is a good example if one looks at the hand rails of the lock one can very quickly work out that ship never went through that lock. Unless it was a miniature.

As to HDR yes I would agree with a cheap (Under £1000) camera there is little option but to combine images. But there is many ways to combine the images from Photoshop to Photomatrix to Picturenaut to simply using layers and masks. Often the manual layers and mask method does a better job to the special programs.

As to painting one can improve the look by converting a photograph into a painting. This photo

was taken specially for an artist so she could use it as a memory jog to paint the scene.

Showing the result the lady was 86 so please make some allowances also with failing eye sight.
It is however interesting to see what she has missed out and also what has been added. I have considered trying to modify the picture to match the painting.

Panorama is another reason for combining images but it does leave a question on how to display. Using programs like picturestoexe one can pan across the image but as to if taking a movie in the first place would not have been better is down to personal preference.

But my widest lens is 18mm and with a cropped CCD that's about the same as a 28mm with 35mm film camera. Many times I find I can't back up enough to capture the whole scene. Using the multi-image option is one way around the problem. I will admit if I had the money to get a wider lens it would be better but one has to realise there are financial constraints. I have considered the fish eye filter and at under £100 it is tempting. But where does one stop?

This image

was made from 12 taken with a light microscope the x4 optic was too much to capture whole slide. However it's not the type of photo I would want on the wall. And focus was a real problem so likely reversing a lens and using a D-SLR camera would work better.

 

[RonO]

Ericmark: You are wrong, that ship did pass there I was present at the time

I have seen photos manipulated by photoshop experts that are really incredible and it is more the incredibility of the shot that makes you assume the picture is ....well....not a photograph or as some of you would put it "not a true representation".

It is one of the fundamental reasons that courts will not accept digital images as evidence except under very special circumstances.

 

[ericmark]

The Duke of Lancaster has been beached since 1979 at LLannerch-y-mor and the The National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port was opened in 1970 but the locks are for wide beam canal boats which are double the width of a narrow boat about 12 foot and would not take a 4,450 gross tonnage ship.

The odd thing is the meta-data for the picture shows the application as being a K10D ver 1.31 not Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows which it should do. It has been altered so one can't even trust meta-data.

The RAW files are harder to fiddle and I would trust a RAW file more. But there is a fair bit which can be done in camera and with my old Ricoh film camera with masks and duel exposure if anything it was easier to fiddle a picture than with a digital RAW picture. I am sure there is a way to produce a RAW fiddle for example taking a picture of a picture but not so easy to do in RAW format.

This did cause a problem as for the A level exam all images taken into the exam were to be as untouched RAW images. However it was found some students did not have cameras able to take RAW images so it was just stated unaltered images and of course some cameras do have build in processing software. So images could be altered in camera. Also as with the example shown one can alter the meta-data so it shows the image as coming from a camera. Added to that all images were submitted as prints so no meta-data for examiners to see it was only the invigilator who could check meta-data. Hence the art A level for Digital Photography was wide open for cheating. 12 hours over the week so one did leave the room many times.

But there was no check at all as to who took the pictures. The only think which you had to do in the exam was to use Photoshop CS4 to manipulate and print the image. The portfolios and write ups were all done at home so could have been done by anyone. So from the A level exam it seem digital photography is Photoshop CS4. I don't agree I think being able to select aperture, ISO, and exposure time plus selecting a scene and framing it is far more important but that part is not tested in exam conditions. You may refer to them in the portfolio but there is nothing to prove you wrote the portfolio its all on trust.

 

[RonO]

Metadata was once seen as the 'proof' but there are so many metadata editors around these days all metadata is now, is a reminder of what was done and when. I'm not sure if metadata editors can alta the data of RAW files, I've never really tried.

I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding the A level exam, the emphasis MUST be transferred away from CS4 and more onto the technicalities: speed/f-stop/ISO and the most important of all - composition.

I have never given much credit to exams, they are written by people who cannot do anything but are good at testing others. However usually their 'tests' are out of data and/or irrelevant to the bare-bones subject.

I did City & Guild 345 in Photography back in 1971. The syllabus was centred on the 'Ilford Manual of Photography', if you could remember that book verbatum and could take a photo of a box of nails and bowl of water - you passed! But was is any use? NO! The exam was all about the chemical eliments that make up developer, fixer, stop-bath and reducer. The theory of photgraphic emulsion on film (negative and transparency and paper. Why did I need to know that? and in the big wide world I soon found I didn't need to know anything I had to learn and prepare for the C&G. I really had to wonder how many college tutors actually believed that photographers mixed their own developer from base chemicals! In the real world it was just a matter of calculation 1 part developer to 4 parts water and a temperature of 68F.

In my working life I frequently encountered youngsters bounce out of college or university with a bag full of certificates - usless the lot of them! I only ever met one half decent 'photographer' out of all of them. Oh sure I met a great many guys and girls who had the theory but their best position in the world of photography would be to go back to college - as teachers! for that is all they really had under their belts, the ability to teach the out of date, and useless information that they were taught.

Not wishing to go too far off topic, but it is the same in other walks of life and is what really p****es me off about the current world where all employers are just looking for certificates. My son studied computers at college for three years - on Windows 95 when all offices were using Windows NT and Windows 2000 by his final year Windows XP had arrived - the college didn't even mention it!

I hang my head an tutt! for the world of employment has become a stupid area run not by the professionals you will work with, but by bright, pretty young things who call themselves Human Resources Experts (because they have a certificate that says so) who only want to see certificates - because that is all they know!

 

[ericmark]

I did read about mixing ones own chemicals and noted how close silver nitrate and nitroglycerin were and decided maybe better not to try!

Cyanotypes sounds interesting and I have an old German half plate which would do nicely.

However unlikely to produce any worth while photos with it today it seems we are forced to go digital. Mainly as film costs so much. But with the old film camera I did use masks and duel expose to create the effect I wanted. Today we can't do this with the camera there is no duel exposure option one has to use layers and masks in software.

I got out the selection of masks and tried them but many were designed for use with black and white and we can't remove the colour matrix from the CCD so to use with a digital camera seems pointless. I can't take a black and white RAW image it has to be Jpeg for the camera to turn into black and white. I have a graduated blue and graduated sepia filter from old days and I did try using it. But really a failure so much easier with software after.

And it is the end result we are aiming for so see no point in making it hard. The lenses, tripod, camera, remote, reversing rings, polarising filter, and close up filters take up enough room as it is when going out to take photos. So see no point in lugging extras I likely will not use anyway. I have used the close up filters to take water drips and tried to use the water drip as a lens. Not very successful. Maybe used 4 times this year. I do ask myself are they really worth carrying around! Even with all four on +17 really not large enough to use a drip. I have to cheat and put glycerine on the leaf to enlarge size of drip. So unless I have bottle of glycerine don't really need close up filters.

 

[^woody^]

It's ironic that you lot who deal with images can certainly write a lot!

 

[jeds]

Digital photography, developing and printing is just a step on from the same processes and progress that were necessary in plate photography and film photography. Film went from exposure times of several minutes to seconds to parts of a second to thousanths of a second and these days millionths of a second. Film emulsions developed in grain, colour, contrast, resolution. Printers' dodged, burned, faded, masked and printing paper developed and changed beyond all recognition in a short life time. Cameras went from one shot per 20 minutes to 10 minutes to one at a press of a button to 3, to 8 to a hundred. Early photographs (i mean in the oridinary sense) were nothing like the more modern ones. If digital developing is cheating then so is a roll film and so is a motor drive and so is a light meter.

The fact is that the earliest ordinary photographs were manipulated far more than most modern digital ones. Blemishes were removed. Areas were softened. Edges were sharpened. contrast was altered. Sound familiar? But it's all photography, and trying to stop time in a particular era won't work because progress is inexorable.

 

[pyounger]

Digital photography, developing and printing is just a step on from the same processes and progress that were necessary in plate photography and film photography. Film went from exposure times of several minutes to seconds to parts of a second to thousanths of a second and these days millionths of a second. Film emulsions developed in grain, colour, contrast, resolution. Printers' dodged, burned, faded, masked and printing paper developed and changed beyond all recognition in a short life time. Cameras went from one shot per 20 minutes to 10 minutes to one at a press of a button to 3, to 8 to a hundred. Early photographs (i mean in the oridinary sense) were nothing like the more modern ones. If digital developing is cheating then so is a roll film and so is a motor drive and so is a light meter.

The fact is that the earliest ordinary photographs were manipulated far more than most modern digital ones. Blemishes were removed. Areas were softened. Edges were sharpened. contrast was altered. Sound familiar? But it's all photography, and trying to stop time in a particular era won't work because progress is inexorable.

But with the exception of retouching spots, it was all done with light - 'photo'. NOT by 'painting' the picture to obtain an image that you would not be able to re-create or even ever see in reality.

Yes, some people did bleach out backgrounds, and I have no objection to that in digital photography, what I object to is people passing of the impossible as a photograph when clearly it isn't, and such 'pictures' should perhaps be referred to by another name - such as a digipic - i.e. a photograph that has been digitally manipulated or enhanced, as opposed to a photograph which is primarily un-retouched or minimally so.

Both paintings and photographs are art, but they are very different mediums, afterall you wouldn't want to turn up at your wedding to find a present-day Picasso sketching the brides mother with her eyes peering from her kneecaps (yes, I did clean that up!).

 

[ericmark]

If one returns to early days with the Camera obscura all the image was painted. All the camera did was help the painter.

Cyanotypes were still done when I was young it was how the blue print got it's name.

But with the negative I have spent hours correcting blemishes and the only real change is the speed at which it can now be done. I am sure everyone has seen the nude pictures of Margaret Thatcher which were done before digital arrived.

The dynamic range of the eye is well above that of the standard camera so very few pictures are a true representative of what is seen unless a very expensive camera is used. And of course we see movement and unless we show a video then it can't possibly be as seen by us.

This image is not altered in any way

however I bet that is not how you see the water coming out of a shower? It likely looks more like this

which is very much fiddled with having at least 3 if not move images making up the final picture.

The picture here

shows the problem with movement again impossible as the milky water was taken at a very slow speed and the bit spurting out was far faster.

So in this one post there are pictures ranging from 1/20,000 of a second to 10 seconds and who can say what speed our eye works at?

Be it speed or depth of field the only way one can take a record of an event to truly show what has happened is to take video and soon as we freeze motion we have altered it. Just look at any collection of snap shots and see the faces pulled or gestures made as motion is frozen.

The only problem is where for example a face cream is advertised and it is air brushed. That is fraud. Or of course crime scene or similar event where one is relying on the camera telling the truth. I would only accept a RAW picture and not even a DNG (digital negative) as these can be converted from other formats. So with my camera only a PNG file which is Pentax RAW could be accepted as being a true representative of the scene. Which of course means a Jpeg is useless.

So all pictures taken with camera phones are useless if one wants to show what really happened. This one

is on my camera phone and if you believe that was done