Doug Kerr
Well-known member
I'm was fascinated the other day by Asher's invocation of the "Philadelphia mallet theory" (which I presume to be named somehow in honor of the home of the academic who espoused it). It basically says that when prehistoric man invented a better mallet, he felt the need to smash flat everything within reach with it.
It's quite parallel to one of my own favorite chestnuts: "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Today we have available a wonderful toolbox for image manipulation. It accommodates everything from basic cropping or simple adjusting of the "tonal scale" to the creation of an image without any photographic source at all - sometimes a "realistic" image, sometimes wholly "abstract".
As I look over the many images presented in the different branches of this forum, I wonder whether many of our artists have "Philadelphia Man's" view of the mallet. Over and over, I see an image I feel is really wonderful, but have the feeling that it doesn't somehow look "natural" (indeed, whatever that means).
We so often hear in critiques that in the delivered image, the model's skin has a "plastic" look. We often see that the model, perhaps as a result of a too-ambitious use of fill flash, or maybe by an over-ambitious emulation of that in post processing, has what I call the "supermodel on the beach" look.
I think a problem is that we, like Philadelphia Man, feel an unavoidable drive to make use of all the image modification tools in our kit.
I think the situation with the visual arts is quite different from that in the verbal arts. In the latter, the aspiring writer is exhorted to "revise, revise, revise".
But I think in the "realistic" branch of photographic art (and I thus exclude works in which extreme effects are part of the art), "she who edits best" may be "she who edits least".
This is not an argument in the direction of "honesty in photography" (a notion that I feel is so ambiguous it can hardly be dealt with). It is an argument for restraint in the use of the powerful tools we all have in our kit. Just because we can do it, gang, isn't a reason to do it at every opportunity. Lets not confuse the completion of an image with a competition in virtuosity in the use of image editing software.
It's quite parallel to one of my own favorite chestnuts: "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Today we have available a wonderful toolbox for image manipulation. It accommodates everything from basic cropping or simple adjusting of the "tonal scale" to the creation of an image without any photographic source at all - sometimes a "realistic" image, sometimes wholly "abstract".
As I look over the many images presented in the different branches of this forum, I wonder whether many of our artists have "Philadelphia Man's" view of the mallet. Over and over, I see an image I feel is really wonderful, but have the feeling that it doesn't somehow look "natural" (indeed, whatever that means).
We so often hear in critiques that in the delivered image, the model's skin has a "plastic" look. We often see that the model, perhaps as a result of a too-ambitious use of fill flash, or maybe by an over-ambitious emulation of that in post processing, has what I call the "supermodel on the beach" look.
I think a problem is that we, like Philadelphia Man, feel an unavoidable drive to make use of all the image modification tools in our kit.
I think the situation with the visual arts is quite different from that in the verbal arts. In the latter, the aspiring writer is exhorted to "revise, revise, revise".
But I think in the "realistic" branch of photographic art (and I thus exclude works in which extreme effects are part of the art), "she who edits best" may be "she who edits least".
This is not an argument in the direction of "honesty in photography" (a notion that I feel is so ambiguous it can hardly be dealt with). It is an argument for restraint in the use of the powerful tools we all have in our kit. Just because we can do it, gang, isn't a reason to do it at every opportunity. Lets not confuse the completion of an image with a competition in virtuosity in the use of image editing software.