Recently in one of nature forums I came across a discussion related to ethics in post processing. Later I realized it may be a good idea define a boundary for myself and put it in black and white. This resulted in a small article -
Digital Post Processing Ethics - My frame of reference
24 April 08 - UPDATED
Made some quick changes to my gallery software to show how post processing is done for each of the images. I am yet to add the symbol UA,DE and DM to all files but I added that feature to my gallery software. For a sample image you can see this one.
Hi Ganesh,
Just like you, this issue was pondering me for quite some time over the last two days or so. I was going through few international forums as to what people say about it and also came across this small but very high impact statement >
“Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality.” — Peter Plagens
At the end its where we draw a line for ourself and also how we present what we shoot matters. And your def of UA/DE/DM is what i really liked verymuch. Hope people start making use of these when they post images in international forums.
Cheers,
Shivakumar
Comment by Shivakumar — April 19, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
Shiv, regarding my definition of UA/DE/DM, the seed for this thought came from Brad Hill’s views on manipulation vs. correction - (http://www.naturalart.ca/voice/manipvscorr.html)
I had some different views which I tried to summerize here. Regarding Peter’s statement, my personal view is slide got replaced by raw file today. Otherwise, even earlier scanned slides where processed by photo processing tools like what we do today.
Comment by ganesh — April 20, 2008 @ 10:35 am
Again, a beautifully written personal views in the form of an article Ganesh. I like the way you have created “Conventions” here. I too wish this article gets recognised in photography forums and people start to use it on the images.
Comment by Pramod Viswanath — April 20, 2008 @ 11:14 am