Curious Discussion

A discussion popped up one day with one of my coworkers over photography. He commented he believed in “pure” photography for his shots and explained he did not believe in any type of manipulation other than cropping. I have found a number of others who either state the same thing or their work shows them to believe the same thoughts.

I’ve wondered why this mindset and no one has been able to provide me with an answer as to why, just the statement that anything else is manipulation and not true photography.

When I first took classes it was in high school. It was Black & White photography. We learned not only how to hold the camera, what depth of field was and how it was affected by camera settings and how to develop our film but we learned to print our own pictures using an enlarger. When we printed contact sheets to determine what images we might try printing full size. Printing test prints we cropped by determining what amounts of the picture was allowed to hit the paper. We adjusted exposure by using a piece of paper to limit light hitting your photographic paper. This is all simple manipulation. We used chemicals to watch those photographs come to life in front of our eyes.

The camera is simply not able to capture every detail in a photograph that the human eye can see. You get the best quality you can from your camera settings and you finish enhancing what your memory saw. This is what I learned from 3 years of formal classes. I would love to have the freedom to take formal classes today but do not have the time. I will continue to take the online, seminars and read all that I can. So far I have not found any arguments that would change what I learned early on in my photography.

I will stay on my current learning course, I will appreciate an image that is straight out of the camera and meets what I remembered trying to capture and if it’s not I will adjust settings and crop to achieve the picture.