Purists beware

I just recently overheard a self-described “purist” photographer ranting on about how we’re all cheaters and that the photographic masters before us lacked our current luxury–even desire–to “customize” (read: manipulate/photoshop) images. It was “…all about the the composition, a beautiful subject, and a properly exposed picture”.

via Chase Jarvis Blog: Purists Beware.

I was mulling over how to broach this subject myself when Chase Jarvis nailed it for me.It came to me that I’d made a fundamental philosophical change in my mindset when I was elbow deep in Lightroom and madly adjusting lighting levels in Viveza that this whold idea of “customization” of photos being either

• bad

or

• unique to digital photography

is bogus.

I’m old enough to have actually spent a chunk of my life in a darkroom. An honest to god, full of smelly chemicals stick things in the liquids and watch the images appear out of nowhere darkroom. Where I’d print multitudes of test prints and experiment with burning in shadows and dodging highlights to fix exposure problems, where we’d use the photographic equivalent of white-out to fix dust spots and do all sorts of “tweaks” to get the final printed photo to look good.

Nobody was a master of that more than Ansel Adams. His artistry was even more in the darkroom than behind the camera. Thomas Hawk talked about that a while back:

So much of Adams’ work was in the darkroom. One of the biggest challenges, even today, when images are used from the Ansel Adams archive (at the University of Arizona in Tucson) is to ensure that the final image from the negative is a quality image. So much of the final outcome of Ansel’s work came from the darkroom.

via 10 Interesting Things I Learned About Ansel Adams

So much of Adam’s quality in his photos is in how he manipulated his negatives to make them the absolute best they could be. So much of these “purity” arguments are bullshit; I’ve been a questioner of HDR, but recently I’ve come to realize that  most critics of HDR (myself included) only notice HDR when it’s done badly — the well-done HDR doesn’t call itself out as HDR, so the good examples don’t balance out the mistakes; they simply don’t get noticed.

I’ve come to realize these turfing fights aren’t new — and aren’t about creating good photos. And honestly, they don’t matter. What matters is the photo, no? Hey, are you going to argue with Ansel Adams? (not me!)

(also see: G. Dan Mitchell)

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