The Past "Photography" the Future "Imagery" Not for ME!

fcheh wrote:

Just food for thought in the good old days we had Photography: Are we at the Tipping Point of "Imagery" where we PS the F* out of the image and call it Photography? I would love to start a forum just for "What I Saw is What You Get" no post processing allowed, not even cropping just natural the way it happened pictures!

One reason why I love a great zoom lens is you crop as you go, you compose then shoot. Primes are great BUT they give you the SAME point of view as everyone else using them.

Think of the days when each and every shot cost MONEY and was composed, waiting for the light, several takes then the lightbox, sorting for the best.

2014 and we have "BURST" shoot the S* out of something and hope something good comes of it and by the time we sit down and view 400 shots of nothing we forgot what we were trying to capture.

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Frank S Cheh
chehartphotograhy.smugmug.com

The great thing about photography (and art in general) is that you can do it the way you want to, without some dictatorial tyrant setting down restrictive rules on how things can or can't be done simply based on his own narrow ideology. If you want to take an "no-touch, as-my-camera-shot-it" approach to photography, go right ahead. But to whine and scream that everyone should do it the same, and to limit the art of photography to such a narrow sliver of of style is simply foolish, egocentric, and delusional. Besides, many of the great photographers of the world, past and present, would certainly disagree with you.

No cropping? LOL. Here's Henri Cartier-Bresson's original negative of his famous "Behind the Gare St. Lazare", aka "man jumping a puddle" photo:

Here's the final image after cropping.

Here are other famous photos before they were cropped:

Che Guevara Original

Che Guevara cropped

Picasso original

Picasso cropped

Igor Stravinsky original

Igor Stravinsky cropped

Robert Frank's "Rodeo", original

Robert Frank's "Rodeo" cropped

No post-processing?  Here are some famous photos and their markups to show the extent of darkroom work they underwent (original article here: marked-photographs-show-iconic-prints-edited-darkroom/ ):

Post-processing and cropping are valuable tools that every great photographer knows to use.  That's simply part of photography.  If you think that "true" photography should be limited to what the camera spits out at the moment you press the shutter button, you're delusional and are pursuing a false ideology that even the best photographers don't prescribe to.  At the very least, you have to understand that the camera doesn't always give you exactly what you wanted, or even saw.  Plus, you're living in an idealistic fantasy world if you think that we should all be going around perfectly nailing the composition and framing every time we take a shot.  Not even the best photographers believe in that!  The belief that many of the world's great photos came out of the camera exactly as we know them today is simply an illusion.  Most of them are a product of skillful cropping and post-processing, which is an important skill for any photographer to know, understand, and practice.