I often hear views that a nature photograph should faithfully portray what is seen by human eyes. I would agree to this if purpose of nature photography is only documentation. First of all the medium of capture (sensor/slide/negative) has inherent limitation compared to human eyes and it is theoretically impossible to portray what we see. For example there is no way I could have made an image of the above butterfly which truly appears like what I saw - either we over expose butterfly or under expose background. Obviously I decided to do latter. Isn’t this a nature photograph ? Is this a manipulation ? Should I selectively open up only background by about 2+ stops to show traces of some branches if any? Isn’t it a selective manipulation then - since people think a modification applied to an image as a whole is only considered OK ? Are we waiting for some supreme authorities to tell us what is accepted and what is not ? We have come all the way from digital is unacceptable to cropping is ok to modifications applied to whole image is ok but not to part of the images to crops, curves a little bit of dodging/burning is ok to … What is that next rule that we are waiting for ? I am not talking about placing a tiger’s head on elephant’s using an image processing software but some of us seem to create boundaries for ourselves in terms of what is accepted. Recently I was talking to a very senior wild life photographer and was telling him I am tired of seeing stereotypic images of xyz bird with feed kind of images and we need to think of something more original and creative. He asked me - “God has created everything, what is there for us to create?” - needless to say I strongly disagreed with him. We are not talking about physically creating something here - but some new perspectives that our inner vision sees and we giving it an expression in the form of an image.
I think following strict rules on what should nature photography be is killing our own creativity. I do think human mind wants to see perspectives which are beyond faithful representation of physical world.
Ganesh,
Reading the above text it really feels like lot of things running in your head when you are putting it across into words.
Off late i too have seen in lot of forums that a lot of emphasis is given on close portraits of birds/mammals, background blur(bokeh), compositional rules, exposure etc. But do we want to have few more decades of the following same old “Art of bird photography” ?
Our eyes can detect more tonal ranges than what a camera can - isnt this false representation of the image ? My F2.8 lens gives me a smooth background for a flower which my naked eye cant identify . . . the list goes on and on and on.
Probably these are some of the thoughts which will remain for time to come and with technology progressing so fast it will be tough to show people that there is another world of opportunity waiting to be explored.
Very nicely penned thoughts . . . SK
Comment by Shivakumar — September 16, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
You are right Shiv! After all our eyes are about 50mm lenses !
What is very interesting to me is we photographers worry lot more about brands of cameras and lenses than artists worry about brands of brushes, canvas and colors. The irony is even manufacturers of cameras/lenses know about this weakness and have built a beautiful business model to push new technologies very fast which will extend such thoughts of us photographers by another decade.
Comment by Ganesh H Shankar — September 17, 2008 @ 3:42 am
Guess this trend set in with the advent of digital technology. Looking back, Film seems to have enforced some preparation and thought in making images to avoid wastage. Considering that most of us are weekend photographers using digital equipment there seems to be a tendency it is no longer acceptable to comeback empty handed after a weekend trip.
Comment by Mahesh Devarajan — September 17, 2008 @ 11:36 am
Ganesh,
I was thinking about it since the time you published this post. One observation that my mind when you thought about these is what I want to say here. I remember the first image very well. I completely agree with you about not able to get the exact conditions that we witnessed there, however, when we were looking at the butterfly ( not through the view finder ), our minds were totally oblivious to the background untill we looked through the view finder for composition!
Be it anything, at home when we we are watching a program on television or talking to anyone face to face, we see lots of other things in our drawing room - be it music system, a fan, a table, what ever, but all those will be oblivious when out sight is concentrated on one thing. Don’t you think so? IF yes, then, that’s what we try to render on the film.
How many out of focus images of a tiger do we see when it stalks its prey? I suppose, when we witness the situation as photographers, we change our ‘point’ of view to witness the overall scene in totality.
With such a long comment post, what I intend to convey is that it’s slightly difficult for me to buy the theory where you/shiva say that OOF BG is not the exact scene what we witnessed.
Let me know your thoughts.
Comment by Pramod Viswanath — September 18, 2008 @ 3:37 pm
Pramod,
First of all beyond lenses there are fundamentally not repersentational limitations such as dimension (3d vs 2d) and other experiences. If a kid slips into our field of vision while we are watching a TV don’t we notice them ? Lenses (tele) physically narrow down field of vision while human eyes don’t. While you are watching a beautiful bird through your bare eyes and an elephant charges at you silently from a side - you still notice it, now think of seeing the same bird through an 800mm lens while an elepehant slips into the scene from side. The point is mind still receives those information may choose not to react to it while longer teles just cuts off those information..
Comment by Ganesh H Shankar — September 19, 2008 @ 2:19 am