Re: When does a Phot-O-Graph become a Phraud-O-Graph?
| March 27, 2015 06:09PM |
|
rehunn Wrote:
==================================
> And to add to the erstwhile Mr. Barr's
> comments, when a picture is posted,
> you were there, and that damn well
> wasn't what you saw!
But(t) ... but(t) Rich -
That's been true since the earliest days of photography. Film in general isn't nearly as sensitive (in the short run) as the human eye, and as usually employed to freeze a moment in time (whether for artistic or histöric purposes) very often misses details in the brightest and darkest areas of a given scene that the eye (if not the mind) is well aware of. And (in the long run) film exposed for extremely long periods to light gathered by telescopes captures ephemeral images way too dim to be noticed in real time even by trained astronomers using those very same telescopes (and that's not even counting films and digital sensors that are extra sensitive to infrared light, gamma rays, etc.) Furthermore, even some very famous photographers used "tricks" (such as yellow filters to intensify the contrast of sky and clouds) to create negatives and the resultant prints that were far more dramatic than the scenes that their eyes had actually seen.
IMHO, it boils down to INTENT - are you trying to please one audience's aesthetic instincts, a different audience's interest in history/reality, or both? Even worse, are you deliberately trying - for political or economic reasons (ads) to distort your audience's perception of The Truth? IMHO, removing minor flaws and distractions from prints based on otherwise well composed historic PHOTO-graphs should not significantly decrease their appeal to either artists or historians. I say this in spite of my uncle Claude supposedly once declaring, "You can fool all of the foamers some of the time, and some of the foamers all of the time - and those are pretty good odds."
- Sincerely, Willie (Wm. Claude Johnson-Barr III, Esq.)
"Not All Who Have Cell-Phones Do Twitter *
"Not All Those Who Ponder Can Think . . . "
* Only TWITS Twitter!
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/27/2015 07:45PM by Johnson Barr.
==================================
> And to add to the erstwhile Mr. Barr's
> comments, when a picture is posted,
> you were there, and that damn well
> wasn't what you saw!
But(t) ... but(t) Rich -
That's been true since the earliest days of photography. Film in general isn't nearly as sensitive (in the short run) as the human eye, and as usually employed to freeze a moment in time (whether for artistic or histöric purposes) very often misses details in the brightest and darkest areas of a given scene that the eye (if not the mind) is well aware of. And (in the long run) film exposed for extremely long periods to light gathered by telescopes captures ephemeral images way too dim to be noticed in real time even by trained astronomers using those very same telescopes (and that's not even counting films and digital sensors that are extra sensitive to infrared light, gamma rays, etc.) Furthermore, even some very famous photographers used "tricks" (such as yellow filters to intensify the contrast of sky and clouds) to create negatives and the resultant prints that were far more dramatic than the scenes that their eyes had actually seen.
IMHO, it boils down to INTENT - are you trying to please one audience's aesthetic instincts, a different audience's interest in history/reality, or both? Even worse, are you deliberately trying - for political or economic reasons (ads) to distort your audience's perception of The Truth? IMHO, removing minor flaws and distractions from prints based on otherwise well composed historic PHOTO-graphs should not significantly decrease their appeal to either artists or historians. I say this in spite of my uncle Claude supposedly once declaring, "You can fool all of the foamers some of the time, and some of the foamers all of the time - and those are pretty good odds."
- Sincerely, Willie (Wm. Claude Johnson-Barr III, Esq.)
"Not All Who Have Cell-Phones Do Twitter *
"Not All Those Who Ponder Can Think . . . "
* Only TWITS Twitter!
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/27/2015 07:45PM by Johnson Barr.
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488 stops for water at Los Pinos tank on closing day Oct. 1979. Photo courtesy Don Richter
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