Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
You are hereby encouraged and implored to critique any use of filters and invited to add your own examples, before and after using a digital filter. But first some background on what we claim is our passion, "photography".
Serious photographers might frown on use of digital filters in their photography, as it is altering the image and frankly a manipulation, a cheat and a lie! Well, to tell the truth, digital photography and even analog photography is always some distorted and incomplete version of the "truth"! Let me elucidate....or else jump to the second post and the subject of "digital filters in our own photography"!
Since the 16th century, at least, the principle of the camera obscure, (essentially a darkened box with a pin hole), could be used to generate an image. Then came a device that allowed portraitists to exploit this phenomenon to draw a person sitting in front of them.
Artist's would put an object or person in front of their device and use a pencil to trace the image on paper.
What photography achieved was having photosensitive chemicals in the paper, make the pencil unnecessary! The light itself created the marks instead of the pencil. So this was "light-drawing" or "photo"-"graph"! The tracing device of portraitists then came to be called a "Camera Lucida". No one thought any new name was needed when film camera companies used the exact same outer forms, with much of the same buttons or dials, to deliver an apparatus that needed no film to record an image. More remarkably, the new "digital" cameras, used all the valuable and beloved lenses of real film cameras. So, no one challenged the concept that "photography" had merely evolved.
I agree with Maris Rusis that a truly genuine photograph has to be analog. The photograph was so termed as a picture was made of what was in front of the camera, by light "drawing" it on the sensitized paper. Just like a pencil lays down marks of the "camera obscura" image on a page. Only analog film and the like can do that. By contrast, silicon wafers used in digital imaging are never "marked" by the photoelectric process, just the "light wells" or "sensels" act as temporary pint point collectors of electric charge. Electrical circuits and software convert the accumulated charge to an analog signal for assembling a facsimile of that image projected on the silica. It's a wonderful process for recording, (albeit indirectly), the arrival of light enenrgy at a surface. However, nothing is written! For the absolute purist, therefore, digital photography is a misnomer as it is really digital recording of portions of the light flux arriving at a surface, not all arriving components, as occuring in classical photography.
Well, too bad, one can say, as the new digital processes are now established and breaking new boundaries, and for some the only kind of photography they have ever known!
A new name did not get coined when technology delivered "digital", photosensitive silica.
But we have moved even further with so-called "digital filters" The patterns of marks made by paint, pencils and crayons have been copied and represented in algorithsms whereby any digital photograph file can be modified to have much of the characteristic marks seen in a genuine drawing or painting!
Lightfield and more: Cameras are now capturing with more than one lens and then allow post processing withing a chosen plane the depth of thecamera's point of view.
So instead of lambasting the increasingly new layers of manipulation as not "kosher", lets simply see how enjoyable the result can be.
If the restyled image evokes richer thoughts and more nuanced emotions or other thoughtful considerations, then the use of filters is justified and can be celebrated.
The danger, of course, is, that the fingerprints of the person taking the picture can get lost and we have an homogenization of individual creativity with so many pictures getting to look alike.
So to use these processes, it is advisable to be very selective and to consider optimizing the controls and the extent of filter use to areas of the image where they make a difference that supports the creative intentions of the artist. As a rule of thumb, I would caution that mostly, we would not likely improve our photographs using such stylized processes.
Asher
Ce n'est pas une photo
Serious photographers might frown on use of digital filters in their photography, as it is altering the image and frankly a manipulation, a cheat and a lie! Well, to tell the truth, digital photography and even analog photography is always some distorted and incomplete version of the "truth"! Let me elucidate....or else jump to the second post and the subject of "digital filters in our own photography"!
Since the 16th century, at least, the principle of the camera obscure, (essentially a darkened box with a pin hole), could be used to generate an image. Then came a device that allowed portraitists to exploit this phenomenon to draw a person sitting in front of them.
Artist's would put an object or person in front of their device and use a pencil to trace the image on paper.
What photography achieved was having photosensitive chemicals in the paper, make the pencil unnecessary! The light itself created the marks instead of the pencil. So this was "light-drawing" or "photo"-"graph"! The tracing device of portraitists then came to be called a "Camera Lucida". No one thought any new name was needed when film camera companies used the exact same outer forms, with much of the same buttons or dials, to deliver an apparatus that needed no film to record an image. More remarkably, the new "digital" cameras, used all the valuable and beloved lenses of real film cameras. So, no one challenged the concept that "photography" had merely evolved.
I agree with Maris Rusis that a truly genuine photograph has to be analog. The photograph was so termed as a picture was made of what was in front of the camera, by light "drawing" it on the sensitized paper. Just like a pencil lays down marks of the "camera obscura" image on a page. Only analog film and the like can do that. By contrast, silicon wafers used in digital imaging are never "marked" by the photoelectric process, just the "light wells" or "sensels" act as temporary pint point collectors of electric charge. Electrical circuits and software convert the accumulated charge to an analog signal for assembling a facsimile of that image projected on the silica. It's a wonderful process for recording, (albeit indirectly), the arrival of light enenrgy at a surface. However, nothing is written! For the absolute purist, therefore, digital photography is a misnomer as it is really digital recording of portions of the light flux arriving at a surface, not all arriving components, as occuring in classical photography.
Well, too bad, one can say, as the new digital processes are now established and breaking new boundaries, and for some the only kind of photography they have ever known!
A new name did not get coined when technology delivered "digital", photosensitive silica.
But we have moved even further with so-called "digital filters" The patterns of marks made by paint, pencils and crayons have been copied and represented in algorithsms whereby any digital photograph file can be modified to have much of the characteristic marks seen in a genuine drawing or painting!
Lightfield and more: Cameras are now capturing with more than one lens and then allow post processing withing a chosen plane the depth of thecamera's point of view.
So instead of lambasting the increasingly new layers of manipulation as not "kosher", lets simply see how enjoyable the result can be.
If the restyled image evokes richer thoughts and more nuanced emotions or other thoughtful considerations, then the use of filters is justified and can be celebrated.
The danger, of course, is, that the fingerprints of the person taking the picture can get lost and we have an homogenization of individual creativity with so many pictures getting to look alike.
So to use these processes, it is advisable to be very selective and to consider optimizing the controls and the extent of filter use to areas of the image where they make a difference that supports the creative intentions of the artist. As a rule of thumb, I would caution that mostly, we would not likely improve our photographs using such stylized processes.
Asher
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