Dodge and Burn: November 2009

I am definitely not breaking new ground here, but have been thinking about this a lot recently and am interested in hearing other people's perspectives.

I started taking photos in high school, when I enrolled in a photography course my school offered. In addition to teaching us about the camera, darkroom, and composition, they taught very basic digital imaging, on what I believe was PS 4.0. At the time I had some concerns about editing my photos, many of which I still have today.

For starters, I will admit that I do some image editing—I actually prefer the term “correction”—in PS after capture. I am not opposed to using PS to edit images, as my many posts on PS will attest. My image editing is limited to color correction, contrast correction, straightening horizons, and some dynamic range adjustments (for instance, if I didn’t use a ND grad filter and wanted to pull the sky out a bit in an image). I know that many photographers would find these adjustments unacceptable. I myself sometimes struggle with how much to adjust an individual image without crossing some ethical line. I have heard people argue that some adjustment is necessary to get an image in line with what the photographer actually saw—i.e. that the photograph is not an accurate representation of the scene and must be adjusted. I buy that, but then wonder how to reconcile that with my admittedly imperfect memory. There are times I am editing an image a week or more after it was captured. How reliable is my memory going to be in reconstructing the scene that I use as a blueprint for editing the image?

I have also heard the argument that using PS is no different than what Ansel Adams used to do in the darkroom. Maybe. But, Adams wasn’t inserting new skies into his photos, and he had only limited control over other aspects of the image. How is using PS any different than darkroom techniques, or using grad ND filters or color filters?

I should state that I consider it absolutely verboten to change the elements of an image. Wild animals should not be added or removed, trees should not be added or removed, more dramatic clouds or skies should not be added. If you didn’t want that tree in the photo, you should have moved when you shot it. This doesn’t always hold, however, as there are times in commercial photography when it is probably ok to add or remove elements of an image. In non-commercial photography, though, it is not allowed in my book.

The questions that I have had more recently have to do with high dynamic range (HDR) images. Where is the line when it comes to using HDR techniques, or is there a line? I believe that there is a line somewhere, but I don’t know where it is. Using HDR a photographer can create some pretty amazing stuff.

People trust photography in a way they don’t any other art form. Photography is often held to a higher standard of truth than painting because of its documentary nature—people understand that clicking the shutter captures one moment in time and expect a photograph to depict just that. Doing anything else without explicitly stating it seems deceitful.

I did come across some old Galen Rowell articles on the subject that are interesting:

Digital Decisions, April 1998

Digital Film Images, December 2000

Digital Deliberations, April 2001