Good taste and moderation in landscape photography

Voici un nouvel article que j’ai rapatrié d’Ipernity lorsque j’ai quitté ce site pour retourner sur Flickr… mais puisque Flickr ne permet pas la publication d’articles, je le poste sur ce blog. Il est en anglais, donc mes lecteurs non-francophones seront contents… et même vous, les francophones, vous avez intérêt à vous y mettre, avec tout ce qu’on nous promet !

Some time ago, I wrote an article In advocacy of Natural Photography, i.e. photography that remains faithful to what the eye has seen and doesn't try to “enhance” reality far beyond anything any eye has ever seen nor will ever see. If that sounds pedantic, buy a copy of National Geographic Magazine and have a look at the photographs in there: that’s what I mean, and that’s my standard for photographic quality and good taste.

Of course, you can choose to go a different route, push those Photoshop cursors all the way (and even further), cross-process, simulate film obsolescence, and the like. That’s perfectly OK, and even I like to do it for fun every once in a while. But I don’t call that photography; that’s creative compositing, graphical arts, image manipulation, or whatever. It’s not less worthy than photography either, it’s just different, and therefore should bear a different name.

This is a good example of the result of such a fun session:

What surprises me very much is how people react to computer “enhancements” of landscape photos.

I have two very recent examples in mind: in the first one, you have a fine, albeit quite classical, view of the high, white limestone cliffs at Étretat in France, with the stone arch and the needle, a very famous and always spectacular sight. In the picture, the cliffs are well photographed, maybe a bit too closely framed with a longish lens, but with good detail and the high tide bringing the water to a nice high level around the base of the stone walls, on a sunny day. Good.

Then, you can picture the photographer in front of her computer screen, and you literally see her mind go, “Hmmm... Nice, but... Well, sunny day, yes, but after all it’s only the English Channel, not the Caribbean, so it’s normal if the colors aren’t so terribly saturated and look a bit, well, bland... Now, what could I do to make them stand out more?”

Now the hand makes the mouse move tentatively towards the Saturation cursor, and off the wall she goes...! The result is a picture with exaggerated yellows and greens, and the murky, gray-green waters of the Channel now look tropical aquamarine, Seychelles-style! Completely ridiculous, completely unnatural.

The second example is an equally classic composition of a river flowing in the middle of a French town, with a nice old house in the background and some cloudy sky behind it. The whole scene is quite nice, well-composed, quiet, a long exposure has been used to make the river’s flow more interesting. It is a low angle view, therefore converging verticals in the buildings could have been corrected (it’s so easy!), but never mind.

Here again, I can see my fellow photographer look at his picture and think, OK, this is towards the end of the day, there isn’t much light and it’s rather dull and not so interesting... What could I do to give some “pop” to it all?

The final result is a flowing river in the foreground and a row of houses alongside it, all bathed in normal, natural, dullish light, and then, behind the roofs, a sky that’s been turned into an explosion of aggressive orange, as if some tremendous sunset was taking place over there... while having absolutely no effect on the foreground, which remain its dullish natural color...! Even more “spectacular”, almost as the eye reaches the top of the frame, this fantastic orangeish light suddenly turns into a darkish grey-blue in a rapid and perfectly horizontal transition, that travels uniformly against empty sky and cloudy parts, as if the sky had been literally painted over...

The fake look of it all is glaring, as are the lack of moderation and the lack of skill on the part of the author of this digital manipulation that has nothing to do with what he actually saw that day.

So: bad taste, excess, clumsiness that makes the faking obvious, and also lack of good common sense that leads so many photographers to produce what they think and hope will be a “spectacular” picture, like no one has ever seen (and for good reason: it never existed in the first place!), but in fact results in a cheesy snap not even worthy of a discounted postcard collection.

What is, however, even more surprising than the above is that so few people notice the fake, the manipulation, the cheating. Even more shocking, they admire it! Comments like “Wow, great capture!”, “Amazing colors!” or “Splendid, bravo!” pour forth over the delighted “photographer”, and if you can understand them coming from people who have no clue and will take anything glaring that’s thrown at them, just like when they watch reality-TV (and there apparently are many of those on photo-sharing sites, to my surprise...), it is all the more astonishing when similar comments come from people whom one knows to be themselves excellent photographers, with a collection of great landscape shots under their belts, people who don’t practice this kind of “cheating”, people who (one would have thought) could tell the difference...

Anyone with a good explanation is welcome to comment! Thanks very much in advance for enlightening me!