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... and not 24 hours after agreeing upon their name, the EyeRiders encountered their first squabble with semantic technicalities.
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This week you are invited to take a picture of that sums up the Holiday Season and motorcycling. Could this be a motorcycle parked in front of snow?
Sorry to barge in, but this simply is not a correct statement. Consider focal length and a subject that is beyond the reach of the lens to be perfectly framed. Even in the days of silver bromide, almost everyone cropped their images in the darkroom--if for no other reason to compensate for the different proportions that could exist between negative and paper. On many occasions a shot is made deliberately with the intent to crop. You're assuming the proportions of the sensor/film is an ideal proportion. Not to mention action shots, where most often "success" is more a matter of timing rather than framing.
Scott makes a valid point regarding film versus digital imaging. Plenty of enhancement occured in the darkroom with filters, frames, retouching negs, etc. It was a secondary process which is absent from digital. I shot photojournalistic work in the film era. The film was digitized for production. Acceptable corrections were sizing, cropping, removal of scratches/dust, and appropriate sharpening (unsharp masking--which is a film technique and not unique to Photoshop, who borrowed the term). Anything else was "manipulation." I don't think it matters if a shot is posted here under the journalism standards. Negating them seems somewhat arbitrary in my opinion.
All that said, most of what I have submitted has been untouched, but I have submitted a couple cropped and resized shots to the prior threads.
The progression from film-era technique/thinking to digital is not linear.
Some good points pro and con have been made in this thread.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and hope that Brad corrects me if I'm wrong.
On this thread, we should go with no photoshop because if an image is selected to be used for a holiday card, the designer may want to do a little work on the image her- or himself, without having to undo our best intentions. I'm also going to guess they should be shot in RAW or--if that is not an option--in the very least compression possible.
As far as our weekly photo assignments go, I've been wondering if we should distinguish between "light photoshopping" as Gail refers to, that is fixing little problems, and "major photoshopping" where a work of art is created from the basis of a photograph. I agree that we don't want to get into the latter, but maybe the former would be OK.
Anyone else care to chime in on this?
Now I realize that a square picture is not going to be very good for a Christmas card, so I guess I won't start my active participation this week.
How do you know if the square picture is going to be very good for a card? The card hasn't been designed and laid out yet. A good picture on a square card is still a good card. If you have something in mind I can speak on behalf of the Holiday Card Team of the Foundation we would like to see it. (Is it weird when I talk about myself in the first person plural? )
Ansel Adams said, “The negative is the score, the print the performance.”
My favorite photography instructor would grade us not only on our prints but also the processed film and contact sheets of our B&W or color negatives. The rational was to learn how to make consistently good exposures and compositions, creating a more efficient and productive darkroom and hopefully better photographers. Other reasons for examining our contact sheets were to see just how efficiently we used our film, meaning, shooting to fill the frame so we would need as little cropping as possible and to see how many exposures we used to get “the” shot.
What I’m saying is SNC 1923 has set up a great template for learning the most basic, often difficult, but essential step in creating a photographic image, that is to look at and constructively critique photos before any manipulations occur. Ansel Adams was a master of negative processing and print manipulation, but it all started with “the score.”
It’s really difficult to not crop or “tweak” a photo before posting, but it is a terrific learning experience. Perhaps we could consider leaving the original guidelines in place, that is, post only one photo with no alteration (other than sizing for the forum.) And then those that want to could take there one image and re-submit a processed, altered, posterized, dodged, burned, cropped, split toned or just tweaked image for a second critique. Discussion of image alterations and techniques could follow the second submission. The second submissions could be on the same thread the following week or on a different thread. Just my two cents worth….
I vote for straight out of the camera, no Photoshop.
SNIP
*Recognizing the photographer should have strived to compose in a manner that would minimize the need for cropping.
SNIP
I think that's the objective. Consider that most of the people here are using their P&S to replace a P&S film camera. They wouldn't perform cropping or play with the prints. They'd take them to Walgreen's, right?I'm glad for the rules to post the unaltered picture.
I took a slug of pictures this weekend at a friend's graduation. In the past, I would have cropped almost every shot, and corrected lots of other stuff. I found I was doing a more thoughtful first shot and rarely need to make changes.
Thanks, Tom, for helping me develop the composition skill I'm still finding.
Voni
sMiling