Warp wrote:
> Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> 
>>Hmmm, I suppose, but I also thought that the lines of people ready to 
>>muse upon truth and artifice in photography were wide and deep. Analogue 
>>cameras were bad enough, but now that the capture is digital and 
>>probably filtered digitally from the start, at least that is what I 
>>assume my camera's different shooting 'modes' are,...it seems that 
>>'faked' is an increasingly relative term.
> 
> 
>   I still consider there to be a difference between, for example, a white
> balance filter and, for example, compositing an image from several source
> images. There's a drastic difference between those two. The latter has
> something the camera didn't "see" (at least not at one single shot), so
> it has a sense of "faking" to it.
> 
>   A very wide panoramic image which has been composed of several images
> taken in quick succession is a rather border case. Personally I consider
> it "faked, but it doesn't bother me too much".
> 
Yes, I take your point, along with your own admission that the 
distinction gets difficult in some cases.

There is no real right or wrong in any of this, I think we all construct 
meaning in slightly irrational ways.  Perhaps a parallel situation for 
me would come from the years I spent painting.  My interest there was 
entirely with mimesis.  Synthesized images were of no interest.  Nor was 
mimesis from a photograph.  For me it was all about the embodied 
experience of reproducing the subject from 'life'.  While I have no 
problem with other people working from photographs, either in some 
conceptual mode, or even as a seemless extension of first hand 
observation, in some realist's need to enhance observation, doing that 
myself is boring.  I have done it, and the results are fine, but I tend 
to forget the paintings afterward and never really consider them as 
something accomplished.  Yet, I also spent hours studying, say, human 
anatomy, so that my observational powers would be enhanced by 
understanding of a subject.

Here is a hobbiest photographer whose work I enjoy:
http://www.ranum.com/gallery/
What I like is how he is totally relaxed with a studio look, controlled 
and artificial, using a 'sweep' as a background to show off his subject, 
then plays with the lighting.  He talks about his works almost 
exclusively in terms of the lighting and posing of the model.  This is 
exactly how I used to paint.  But he also talks about his 
'post-processing' in photoshop in an equally relaxed way and in a way 
that suggests that it is seemless in his mind with the actual camera-work.

There are some interesting examples of this here:
http://www.ranum.com/fun/lens_work/articles.html

Again, none of this is to suggest that any approach or opinion is right 
or wrong.  It is more about how people construct meaning, sense truth, 
focus their emotions.  What they pay attention to and what they need to 
eliminate when enjoying 'art'.

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