I reckon the latest version of the ‘Slide Snob’ is the ‘Jpeg Snob’, those wonderful people who tell you that if you’re a good enough photographer you don’t need to shoot RAW.

We had a guy show his pics at our club in Sydney on one occasion. Big prints of defocused/diffused flower closeups, all done in camera on colour neg film. He was very proud of there not being any digital manipulation, but they were _very_ colourful. I asked him how he got so much saturation. He said his (digital) lab operator increased the saturation for him… Ah, purists!

Cheers, Colin

I think that perhaps Im missing the starting point of this discussion but not where you are going with it.

Sorry but I have never felt constrained by what is “kosher” nor have I assumed every photograph to be a “document”. I distinctly remember, while using my Pentax Spotmatic at high school, thinking that whoever said “the camera never lies” had it completely wrong.

As you know I am interested in the documentary genre … but I also feel no reluctance to use digital tools making such images. I have no problem with cloning, dodging, scaling, merging or whatever to make my point. When I present an image I am saying “this is what I saw” not “this is what it looked like”.

There are a group of photographers I refer to as Slide Snobs. They will be lamenting the end of kodachrome because I dont think that they have gone past that. The viewpont I do not agree with is that everything done “in camera” is somehow purer or better as a photographic vision. Creative post process work is viewed with suspision and considered to be cheating in some way. Using Velvia is OK but pushing the vibrance slider is not really on.

Perhaps you post was intended to take such photographers in a bold new direction. Or perhaps underneath the expressive “digital artist” there lies an ex slide snob!!!

I also sometimes wonder about the art worlds insistance in spending a good part of the time looking backwards in time. Although I dont have an fine ats background I can see the value in understanding the history of your medium. However I do think that there is a fine line between understanding traditions and being constrained by them.

……….back to you

And as another “starter for 10″

What is it that tells you that an image is “finished” in post process? As you say it can be reworked again and again.
One day one set of 10 layers will feel right and another day perhaps another subtle variation will seem better. So when do you stop?

Ian

I can see is going to be a great fishing season this year.

Many thanks for your comments, however going to take issue with you on this one. (Well why wouldn’t I?).I think you may be missing the point of my argument. And perhaps not seeing the possibility opened to you.

I’m sorry but I totally disagree about the unimportance of the tools.if you’ve ever shot slide film, you know that it’s pretty much done and dusted when you press the shutter. the camera has evolved to keep pace with the technology, and while nothing much has changed in 200 years, (I agree with you on that) photography’s traditional aesthetic means thatit is the moment which is important, and any postproduction is tailored to realising that. In a sense, excessive deviation from the truth of the moment is not really kosher when attempting to stick to the idea of the photograph was document.

I think it was Ansel Adams who said: the negative is the score, the print is the performance.it took him nearly 20 years before he felt the performance of some of his prints met what he was trying to achieve. For all that, it was about fine-tuning his negative to extractthe last ounce of intention from the latent damage, while remaining as close to it as possible.

We now have the possibility to take our score, and rewrite it in a way that he never could. We can take the latent image and add to it, inject layers of meaning and memory and whatever we choose at a later date.one file, either alone or combined with others, can yield an infinite multiplicity of interpretation and variation in the coming years.it can plus grow with us in a way that a traditional approach and aesthetic will not countenance.

Imagine you take a single file and work with it every year for 20 years. You can rewrite not only the performance but the script itself. In doing so, you can move in any direction and outwards from the original score (or back inwards).

Im puzzled as to why you seem to want to treat the capture and the post capture process in a different way.

You say that the D3x is a descendant of the plate camera and that the silicon chip is simply another means of recording a latant image. I agree and I have never considered myself any different as a photographer with a digital camera than I did when I used film.

Another thing that the D3X and the plate camera have in common is that they do not record an image but instead they record a latent image. Something else has to happen before there is a picture.

So why do you want to consider what you do with the computer as somehow different to what the early photographers did with chemicals?

For that matter do you want to think of Ansell Adams as a “darkroom artist” because he enhanced his images in post production.

For me a photographer is someone who “sees” as a photographer. If you see different light patterns in the landscape, if you are aware of the subtile differences in colour temperature between sunlight and artificial light or if you notice variations of tone in shadow areas then you are a photographer.

How you capture this vision is simply a matter of choice of tools.

“Was it photography? Of course not.”….. I completely disagree. You stood in that field and “saw” those images and that is what makes you a photographer.

You may not have completely recognised the specific images until they came to life on the computer screen…. but see them you did.

Ian