Fraud
I popped down to the Causeway today to grab a snap of the Drove. I've been waiting for a break in the turgid weather we've been having to try and get out and test the new camera, and today happened to present the opportunity.
With all the rain of late the Drove has been close to overflowing, really the highest I've ever seen the water level (or at least noticed, anyway). I figured there would be a pretty reasonable composition down here with the, now fixed, focal length of 40mm.
I was wrong. It transpires there isn't really any focus to the image, it's a bit of a nothing shot, but I took it anyway as I still needed to test out the editing software I've opted to run with for now.
Over the last fifteen odd years I've learned an awful lot in Photoshop, especially for the purpose of photo editing. I've always tried to edit my photos with the intention of subtly enhancing what is already there, not pushing things. A tweak of saturation here, a smattering of contrast there, some gentle nudging around the Curves and Levels settings, the removal of distractions in the image with the aid of the clone and spot healing brushes, that sort of thing.
I've watched Photoshop advance in leaps and bounds from CS3 all the way up to the new cloud based system, which I unsubscribed from after selling all my Canon gear. This time round, however, I thought I'd grab something cheaper and less involved for my latest return to photography. I wanted something that I wouldn't end up spending too long fussing over, something that would let me make the fundamental tweaks, something akin to the apps I've been used to on my phone (Snapseed and the stock Android editing thingy, mainly).
I found something, but I'm not going to tell you what it is just yet.
The problem I've stumbled across today though is I think photo editing software has perhaps advanced a little too much now. It has certainly made some of the more advanced editing techniques very, very easy, and I don't think that's a good thing.
To set the scene of this shot; as I walked along the Causeway there were a couple of very large flocks of birds, a good eighty to one hundred birds in each, both twisting around in the sky right where I wanted to shoot. I couldn't believe my luck! When I actually arrived at the right spot to compose they'd all flown away, which was a bit rubbish. I decided to wait it out and see if they returned. During the wait a huge Heron turned up, accompanied by three very young Herons. I had a limited amount of time to spare, and during that time the large flocks never returned and the Herons never took flight again. I popped off a few frames whilst waiting but decided to give up as the light was changing and without the birds in the right place there was nothing that would make this a great image. I left.
I dumped the RAW into the new software to see if I'd enjoy the workflow or if I should revert back to Photoshop and Lightroom. I fiddled with the basic settings, all of which were straightforward and yielded the right results. Then I found some settings that made light work of serious enhancements. I tried one out. It worked too well.
Personally I don't think there is a bridge over the gap between image enhancement and image manipulation. The latter, to me at least, feels like it becomes a piece of digital artwork, not a true representation of what the camera saw. A photo captures that moment in time, it's a visual record of the scene/person/event etc. Shooting in RAW and then pulling back the exposure, colours and contrast is nothing new, it was a darkroom process before it was digital, and if done properly just serves to enhance that photo. Manipulation is something else entirely.
There is a fundamental aspect of this picture that wasn't how it looked through the lens, and it makes me feel like the whole image has been cheated, it's a fraud.
I've punched the colours and tones a bit, and I've done a couple of little tidy-ups, removed a plastic bottle that was floating in the water, and cropped slightly to 4:5 ratio. But with just one click (then some subsequent fine adjustments) something significant changed.
It's potentially put me off the software, but I'll persevere for a while to give it a fair test with lots of different images. I don't intend on using these manipulation tools anyway, I'm only really here for the basic bits and pieces.
Can you work out the edit? What are your thoughts on manipulation? Do you like the final image or do you agree it's a bit of a nothing? All of this stuff is subjective anyway.
Sound off in the comments (or in the Facebook comments if that's why you're here).
As an aside, if you were so inclined to zoom in just to the right of the darkest ripples in the water, you'd see the Heron and it's young, but I don't know what Tumblr compression is like, so they might be a bit blockier here than in the original.
1/200s - ISO 320 - f/16