Lucian wrote:
Well if you were taught correctly back in college, about photography, you would have learned that there is only one way to make a correct photo and that is always... in the camera. Post processing is to help finish off what you might not have been able to do in camera, or alter what was available to you when you took the photo. Post processing is never to help correct what you should have done in camera, in the first place.
Please remember that contrary to popular belief, Dodging and Burning in post, are NOT steps to take care of mistakes God made, in establishing good tonal relationships.
Well if you were taught correctly back in college,... (
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While I would agree that it is a great *goal* to achieve photographic nirvana in/at the camera, I am adamantly opposed to the idea that there is only one way to make a great image. Here's why those professors are
moronic, absolutist robots wise men being a bit less than honest with you with a
mis-guided well-meaning purpose.
As a corporate AV producer, I made tens of thousands of slides in the 1970s and 1980s. YES, I did my level best to control lighting (ratios, color temperature, dynamic range, etc.) at the point of exposure. I metered with an incident meter, spot meter, color temperature meter, and still bracketed. I paid attention to moment, composition, scene contents, and countless other editorial issues related to our corporate image and our message to customers and employees.
With slide film, that is what we did, and what some (few) still do. The actual film was projected in our multi-image shows, and that had to look correct when it came out of the processing tanks, even when — especially when — we were running 960 slides through 12 projectors onto three wide screens in ten minutes. E6 is a rigidly controlled process. I could push a stop in an emergency, but otherwise, it was time, temp, dilution, and pH, with statistical process control and careful replenishment to keep it honest. So yes, slide photography probably is where what you were taught has the most merit.
Still, we had a slide duplication setup where we could alter color, add titles, make composites of several images, create special effects, and accent the message or story within the image by cropping and enlarging. Then we added music, story, narration, careful editing, and animation programming to shape the character of the show's message for maximum emotive and substantive impact.
When I used transparency film in the studio for product illustrations and such, I did my part to get as much of my art director's vision on film as possible. But the fact remained, he would always work with the color separations team to retouch the image from there. The printed product often looked very different from the transparency.
In all my experience with black-and-white work as a yearbook candid photographer (as a high school student and as part of my job in AV, working for a yearbook company), I considered the goal to be storytelling. Photojournalism is the art of communicating via words and pictures. Whatever promotes understanding — communication — (a common thought held in union) between journalist and reader/viewer — is valid. You're telling a story that has a purpose or goal. That purpose or goal may be historical, informational, influential, whatever. Achieving that requires work at the camera, and in post-processing.
I consider the most important part of that to be ensuring that the reader/viewer "gets it." If that means cropping, dodging, burning, correcting unavoidable exposure or color errors, fixing horizon lines, or anything else that is not editorially falsifying the story (such as removing parts of a scene or retouching people to significantly alter identity or appearance), so be it.
If there is one thing I've learned in college and in life since, it is that whatever someone presents as an absolute will ultimately be proven inaccurate, incorrect, inappropriate, or irrelevant.
Professors who teach that photography must be done correctly at the camera are just trying to be helpful. They are practicing a friendly sort of deceit that helps shape students' behavior. When you're learning, it helps to have boundaries and requirements that guide you to apply "proper form" to your actions. Once you have those basics, though, the rules may be broken freely because you know which ones can be relaxed, and how, and why, and whether you can compensate effectively later in the process.
The goal is to do as much as possible early in the process, so you have less to do at the end, and so you can maximize your chances for quality image making.
An example is careful film handling. If you're careless about processing, then poor agitation, slack temperature control, not using fresh chemicals, not using Photo-Flo, drying in a dusty area, fingerprinting your negatives, or scratching the film will surely ruin the end result. Darkroom workers who learn to clean negatives before putting them in an enlarger or printer will not have to reach for the spotting fluids and brushes later.
Photography is a process that begins with mental visualization and ends with physical or virtual realization of an image (print or digital). Each operation along the way affects every other step in the process. It's like working in a company where 17 people perform different actions on something when making it into a finished product. Foul it up at the start, and the end product may be unacceptable (or expensive to correct). So whatever can be done to ensure adherence to standard at every stage of the process will improve the outcome (a faster, better, less costly, more satisfying result).
There comes a point in the working world of photography, though, when you learn to make split decisions about what can, should, can't, and shouldn't be done at the camera. Whether working with film or digital, the goal is the same: to connect with the viewer of your work. In my experience, discipline up front makes it easy all the way through.
But often, when an image didn't look quite right "out of the camera," it can be corrected sufficiently to achieve its purpose. Just look at Robert Capa's photos of D-Day in World War II and you'll see what I mean. They're technically lousy, but editorially powerful, and an important part of history. Gritty, blurry, reticulated emulsion can sometimes add to the mood of a scene. (Read the story of how he made the few photos he could manage that day, and you'll understand.)
I recently went through a shelf of 40 photography books I've collected over the years. One thing stood out: the technical imperfection of pre-automation film photography and offset or photogravure reproduction. Yet somehow, that did not affect the impact of most of the images in those books! The stories came through, despite their humble beginnings.
The medium is important. But the MESSAGE and its IMPACT are far more important.