UKC

Is it just my imagination, but if you submit a photo that has been over photo shoped and saturated to hell and back, you are on to a 5 star shot for sure.

In reply to Russell Lovett: examples?

In reply to higherclimbingwales: The number one spot photo in this weeks ukh photos (the hope project). Dont get me wrong i do like this photo but would like to see the original copy. What im trying to say is what do peole want to see and would prefere the shot as originaly shot. With a bit of tweaking or one which looks realy good but bears no resenbalance to what was infront of the lens. For the record most of mine fall into the second catogry.

In reply to MJ: Do like this photo but a bit over the top, would look good on a postcard. Think I would not have gone as wild on the saturation myself. But what I'm trying to get a feel of is what do other people want to see, when I showed my wife this photo she thought it was great and said why can't I get shots like that. I told her what had been done to the photo and she said she thought it still looked great and prefered it as it was to what was probably infront of the lens when it was taken. So what do you all think better to much or go for just a little to give your photos that little umf.

In reply to MJ: I agree. Surely if the shot is Photoshopped to the extent that it looks artificial then it fails.

In reply to Russell Lovett: It looks more like a graphic image than a photograph, maybe useful on an eye catching poster or book cover.

In reply to Russell Lovett:

So isn't black and white photography false then?

If the end result pleases, then it doesn't matter about the technical stuff behind it.

In reply to Russell Lovett:
Another particular poor example of over-saturation:
http://tinyurl.com/coovspa

In reply to Russell Lovett:

The voting system has many anomalies. I'm frequently bemused by why some photos attract the votes that they do. A case in point, your recent submissions of a set of pics from Coombe Gill are very ordinary (i think you'll agree) but they have garnered quite a lot of votes. Is this because they have your name appended ?

POTW does indeed often display the traits which you have stated. The many knowledgeable photographers on here presumably just shake their heads and bite their tongues.

But, i think you have picked on the wrong image here. I agree with Al, this photo is so overcooked that it almost becomes graphic art. Nevertheless, the image is very appealing to many people, especially climbers, for whom, sometimes, the world isn't big enough. It's images like this that give a glimpse of what that 'bigger' world might look like.

In reply to sheep:


I don't get this thing about a 'bigger' world. Isn't ours big enough?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17667891

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

In purely physical terms, it's more than big enough for the likes of me !

However, as a human being, i have the ability to use my imagination, my 'mind's eye', to see things that aren't really there. I can make the experience of, say, doing Corvus in the rain 'bigger' than it actually is.

In reply to sheep:

Obviously, if we're creating something, we use our imagination in the way you describe. But, when dealing with the raw material, i.e the experience of life and nature, I prefer to appreciate it as it is, for what it is. Do I make sense? Probably not

In reply to Russell Lovett:

Can someone point me to the photography rule book. Some of you obviously have a copy, but it`s missing from my shelf and I want to make sure my images comply with the rules.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


i'm thinking probably not. <insert smiley>

I've seen your fantastic pictures Gordon. You're not the kind of guy who just goes for a walk and takes a few snaps along the way. You make plans to be in the right place when the light is at it's best. If i pass one of your viewpoints i don't expect it to look like it did when you took the photo.

It therefore follows that you, by your skill as a photographer, have 'added' to the scene. You have made it 'bigger'.

In reply to sheep:

Yes, but that illustrates my point. That's doing something creative with the raw material, which is not the same as the raw material, or the 'being there' i.e. being in the landscape, the actual landscape as climbed or walked in.

In reply to ChrisJD: Not saying either way is right or wrong, diffrent strokes for diffrent folks, just interested in which kind of shot people prefer , as shot with a bit of tinkering or glammed up.

In reply to Russell Lovett:


The fact it got POTW should answer that!

<I didn't vote>

In reply to ChrisJD: I should have cottened when my wife said she prefered that photo to my photos after all she knows everything about everything and I know nowt. God I hope she never reads this

Isn't what you saw at the time inherently subjective?

The eye is made of water and jelly and only has high resolution colour imaging in a small spot in the centre of field of view, so unless you apply a black and white filter and a gaussian blur to everything except for a little mask in the center of your image then sorry you are not being faithful to what you saw. And don't get me started on what field of view the eye has. You can choose to take in a whole panorama at once, or concentrate on something the size of an ant, even though your field of view hasn't changed a bit.

Alternatively, you can admit all this stuff is subjective and try to recreate what you percieved at the time, which may bear little relation to the light hitting the lens of the camera.

All that said, the linked beach photo is too overcooked for my liking, but that's just me.

In reply to MJ:

Somewhat off topic I know, but that would work very well if it could be printed onto glass - it looks like the hyper-reality of the colours on painted glass.

I'm mainly guilty of Monochrome at the moment, either that or de-saturating my images (see some of my recent Flickr content - especially http://www.flickr.com/photos/drupka/6915545448/ where I've 'turned-down' the green to emphasise the silvery nature of the wet grass) so I'm just as guilty of the other direction. I've also been guilty of over-emphasising certain colours in other shots: mainly green or orange/red, for some reason.

More back on topic: I need to find the references to the research about how generally adult humans (with full colour vision) prefer images with more saturation/contrast/local contrast, though the more 'sophisticated' the "visual culture" of the society a given subject belongs to, the less this is evident...

PP.

In reply to Russell Lovett:
Yes the curse of Velvia returns! For me it's essential that a great landscape (or climbing) shot shouts out "yes I was there, it was really like that, what a fantastic planet we live on"

The single set of photos of mine that garnered the most praise when I posted a link to them on here was a set that I took on a compact digi (due to flat battery on the dSLR that day) and post-processed when somewhat tipsy and thinking "ah what the hell, I will ramp up the contrast and oversaturate these" (after years of being very disciplined). I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the UKC massive seemed to like them! No accounting for taste.

These are they.
http://blue-straggler.net/Hartlepool/
(shot with snax and Richard Carter in tow )

In reply to Blue Straggler:
I like those. I'm very partial to industrial wastelands.

In reply to pneame:

This was a magnesium processing plant which was being broken down. snax of this parish spotted it. There were people hacking away at piping to get some scrap copper, probably getting themselves £10-worth at best for half a day's manual labour. I was not bold enough to photograph them, though to their credit they did not seem to resent us three poncing around with cameras whilst they toiled to make a few bob.

In reply to pneame:

Do you think they are oversaturated?

In reply to Blue Straggler:
No. Not at all. Conveys the grittiness.

In reply to pneame:

It's quite interesting when someone likes the over-saturated photo that are un-realistic. That says alot about their taste and their understanding of photography

The properley educated will know it's false

In reply to Mike Hutton:

The fashion photographer Nick Knight did rather well from cross-processed work in the 90s (iirc).

Just because something has been tweaked - in this case quite a lot - doesn't mean it loses value as a photograph. The properly educated will know this to be true () - there are countless examples of famous photo manipulation out there, dating back to the start of photography.

In reply to ChrisJD:

Well said

In reply to Tall Clare:

Most people will accept that a small amount of over-saturating can give the truest depiction of nature because the mind/eye tends to exaggerate what we see anyway. One interesting phenomenon that no one has mentioned is that, generally, the smaller the image the more it has to be oversaturated. Most web designers will have discovered this. Typical thumbnails of only 100 px wide for example have to be oversaturated by between 20-30 per cent beyond a medium to large sized image. A very large image, e.g. as large as a big monitor or larger, will require no over-saturation at all. No rules here; this is just my experience.

In reply to Mike Hutton:

I'm so happy being with the great unwashed

In reply to Mike Hutton:
I used to share your point of view, Mike, but nowadays I find myself siding with ChrisJD. Perhaps I'm not taking enough photos currently ...

All photography is a corruption from what is really there to see with your eyes. You can strive as a photographer or artist towards capturing and communicating what it was like to be there, or you can work towards something more idealised and (dare I say) creative. There is no right or wrong. You've just got to go the way you feel you should.

Afterall, last time I looked, my eyes didn't have a polariser in front of them!

In reply to Russell Lovett: When does a digital image stop being a photograph? If I remove pylon wires, remove eye-sores such as litter, replace sections of the sky with parts of another image (to add in some dramatic clouds) and then change the shading on a hillside, change the colours of someone's clothing or even add in images of people (such as putting a figure on the summit of some peak or ridge)? Can I still call it a photograph (as the image bears little relation to what the camera actually captured)?

Perhaps I could edit in a shot of a full moon into a night picture and put some planets around it (even when the moon wasn't visible that night). The possibilities are endless...

In reply to GeoffRadcliffe:

People have been doing this sort of thing for years, long before the advent of digital photography, and still calling it photography. Photoshop replicates a lot of what people used to do in darkrooms, with different negatives, toners, chemicals, papers, dodging, burning and blocking tools.

In reply to GeoffRadcliffe:


yup. Photography doesnt have to be a direct representation.
There are exceptions eg for news reports most editing should be out or some competitions. So to take the moon and planets shot, if thats to try and win a astronomy photo prize i would consider it unethical.

personally, i would mark up those which have had editing (beyond the very basics) but if anything over saturated tend to be less problematic on this scale since its fairly obvious.

In reply to Russell Lovett:

'The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.'
Ansel Adams


One mans tweak is another mans overcooked.We could argue until the end of time on that one! So let folk do what they will, its their creation after all..

And yes, people had been manipulating photographs for a long time before the humble computer was invented, its just become more easily executed and accessible to the masses nowadays.

In reply to Mike Hutton:

I dimly remember under-exposing / overexposing film, using different processing chemicals, over processing prints, using different paper, different films back when I was in my mid-teens. I certainly can't remember what I did, but it was fun and taught me about the chemistry of photography.
When I could afford colour, I always liked Kodachrome 25 and preferred it to Kodachrome 64

With most people on sites like this (or indeed mass photographic competitions) spending no more than a second or so looking at a shot the the immediacy of saturated and contrasty shots will hit quickly and get attention. Whether or not they are any good when viewed in the long term is another matter. In some respects it's like the photographic equivalent of sweet or salty snacks.

In reply to MJ:

I concur in sentiments that it's unreal looking.

If I'm not mistaken, though, there is a rather large DUST spot in the near-top, left-of-center sky --just too round & unlike the rest of the clouds (and maybe a smaller, darker one, to the left of this)!

- - - - -

How does one reliably get the captured image to well match what one's eye saw?
That, to me, is a great challenge. Often, some bit of increasing some aspect of
the image will seem nicer, in post-processing.

*kN*

In reply to GeoffRadcliffe:

By Jove, I think he's got it!

In reply to Russell Lovett: Well certainly the pudding in question is over-egged (tho' arty). This one is hardly touched (just a spot of adjustment to white balance and the merest hint of saturation - honest.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61699270@N05/7084734721/