Too much Photoshopping is a bad thing, I guess.

Ansel done a ton of darkroom editing, was at the forefront of camera technology development too.

He probably didnt clone as we know it but it wasnt far off, and I'm guessing he would be way into photoshop etc now.

Ansel Adams would abuse the snot out of Photoshop. He'd be like a pig in mud.

A good picture is a good picture, that is said to be better than thousand words, with or with out photoshop.

If a photographic society is ignorant enough to deny Post processing, they must be ignorant adequately to call use of Camera as an unnatural, machine polluted, abuse of photographer's talent as well.

^^ yeah, its kind of BS. Not long ago I wanted to enter a photography competition with a panoramic picture. I read the rules just in case and they didnt allow stitched photos in their landscape category! WTF?

Shadowblade wrote in post #15210201
Stupid rule.

Photographers have been doing the same thing for almost a century, in the darkroom.

And, you must ask yourself - do you take photos to win competitions, to sell prints or to produce an artistic end-product?

Exactly my first thought when I saw the news. Charlie Waite please note.

RbnDave wrote in post #15236253
Maybe it's just me, but I think the power of photography is its ability to depict what's real -- the world as you might see it.

Perhaps a good description of what photojournalism is all about, but not pictorial photography. If all we're doing is recording what already existed, then our work is at best redundant--but you can never truly replicate the experience of 'reality' within the four edges of a flat, still picture. A good pictorial photograph, therefore, is a translation of an experience, a realization of an idea, or both. The issue of 'naturalism' is another matter entirely, however.

I well remember a Charlie Waite shot of a WW2 bomber with an extremely evil looking cloudy sky. To get the plane and the clouds right meant that some subtle tweaking was needed, so CW can say what he likes but does it himself.

Phrasikleia wrote in post #15243842
Perhaps a good description of what photojournalism is all about, but not pictorial photography. If all we're doing is recording what already existed, then our work is at best redundant--but you can never truly replicate the experience of 'reality' within the four edges of a flat, still picture. A good pictorial photograph, therefore, is a translation of an experience, a realization of an idea, or both. The issue of 'naturalism' is another matter entirely, however.

Also, an unprocessed photo poorly represents what *we* see. It only represents what the *sensor* sees. Our eyes constantly flicker from side to side, the brain interpolating the images to give us essentially a panoramic field of view. The pupil also constricts and dilates in order to let us visualise bright and dark areas, and the brain interpolates these images to let us visualise a scene with a much higher dynamic range than the retina's native range. The brain is great at compensating for white balance, while we still get a sense of whether something is 'warm' or 'cool', not just visually, but from our other four senses.

A single, unprocessed frame from a sensor, with a flat tone curve, is a terrible approximation of this.

You guys are lumping all processing together, as if it was the same. It isn't.

And, the statement regarding AA was not whether AA would be using Photoshop fully... of course he would. The statement was made that he did the same thing as the OP referenced picture in the darkroom... he didn't.

His manipulation was mostly dealing with light and shadows. Manipulating the sky to enhance the clouds through the use of filters, dodging, and burning, is not the same as adding a sky from a different time and place to the image. There is nothing "wrong" with that, per se, even in landscape photography (re: Lik and many others), but it was clearly against the contest rules.

The contest entered had multiple categories, at least one of which would have allowed the photo as entered, so to accuse the contest organizers of being hypocritical is just uninformed, it seems to me.

The "Classic View" category, which he entered, clearly says in the rules that "the integrity of the subject must be maintained and the making of physical changes to the landscape is not permitted (removing fences, moving trees, stripping in sky from another image etc)" and that "the judges will allow more latitude in the ‘Your view’ category, which aims to encourage originality and conceptual thinking."

He entered the wrong category, and once this was discovered/revealed/ad​mitted, he was disqualified. No artistic "wrong" was committed against the photographer. He violated the rules, he admits he violated the rules due to not paying attention, and he was DQed.

All the straw man arguments in this thread are tiresome.

RTPVid wrote in post #15244813
You guys are lumping all processing together, as if it was the same. It isn't.

And, the statement regarding AA was not whether AA would be using Photoshop fully... of course he would. The statement was made that he did the same thing as the OP referenced picture in the darkroom... he didn't.

His manipulation was mostly dealing with light and shadows. Manipulating the sky to enhance the clouds through the use of filters, dodging, and burning, is not the same as adding a sky from a different time and place to the image. There is nothing "wrong" with that, per se, even in landscape photography (re: Lik and many others), but it was clearly against the contest rules.

The contest entered had multiple categories, at least one of which would have allowed the photo as entered, so to accuse the contest organizers of being hypocritical is just uninformed, it seems to me.

The "Classic View" category, which he entered, clearly says in the rules that "the integrity of the subject must be maintained and the making of physical changes to the landscape is not permitted (removing fences, moving trees, stripping in sky from another image etc)" and that "the judges will allow more latitude in the ‘Your view’ category, which aims to encourage originality and conceptual thinking."

He entered the wrong category, and once this was discovered/revealed/ad​mitted, he was disqualified. No artistic "wrong" was committed against the photographer. He violated the rules, he admits he violated the rules due to not paying attention, and he was DQed.

All the straw man arguments in this thread are tiresome.

The thread took a turn on the last page after the topic turned to photography in general. The last 20 posts or so do not regard the contest, so they are not "straw man arguments" about it. I think we can all agree that anyone who doesn't follow the rules of a contest they enter should be prepared for a downfall. The discussion about processing in general is far more interesting, which is why so many of us ultimately went there.

Deleted.

Meanwhile, these images were also removed from competition, however I cannot tell how these were photoshopped either....

http://thechive.com …ly-not-shopped-33-photos/

HarrisonClicks wrote in post #15246114
Meanwhile, these images were also removed from competition, however I cannot tell how these were photoshopped either....

http://thechive.com …ly-not-shopped-33-photos/

Hey, I have an idea... I think I'll take a photo of an adult and his/her infant child and use photoshop to swap their faces! That'll be cool! Original, too!

(Actually, some of those were quite funny...)

Lovely.

It is interesting to read repeated references to Ansel Adams as precedence-setter in regards to post-proceesing ethics. Why is that? He was, of course, a master photographer, but he worked and lived in a pre-digital age. Whatever he may or may not have done in post-processing does not seem relevant to me because he did not have the good fortune of having access to the same digital processing tools modern photographers do. It seems pointless to make remarks about how much Photoshop editing is too much by appealing to someone who never used Photoshop. Why not appeal to a modern contemporary master as a modern precedence-setter, like someone who actually uses a digital post-processing workflow.