"Since the introduction of labour-saving devices there has been a noticeable increase in mental illness, silly ideas, depression, stress and anxiety. Arguably this is due to the amount of time we now have to sit around wondering what to do." - Unknown
"The Secret to sexy is imperfection" - Designer Lanvin
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Digital rendering is incredibly useful. It is also incredibly boring and incredibly accurate.
I designate photography as having two primary functions:
1. The Replication of Reality - No matter how staged and assembled commercial photography is, the goal tends to be to give the feeling of how people believe they see the world: What I call the "Reality Replicator."
Reality replication used to require intense amounts of transparency color film in sizes from 6x7cm to 8x10" for much of the glam food product shots and fashion spreads. These images would be created with bracketing within 1/3 stops - and most of the time 99% of shot and processed film would be tossed for the best, most compelling and most commercially viable image.
While digital has rescued an immense 'modern' wastefulness in color process film, it has conversely enabled and empowered the truly unimaginative. The 'lab rat' inside of each photographer is cultivated by digital. Countless tabletop photographers have been consumed by the access of the technology - almost to the point where access to retouching is inhibiting their effectiveness as business people. And every commercial photographer is this market has been enslaved to their computer - each becoming their own photography lab. It's something of a break-down of community.
2. The Reality Interpretor - Black and white is an example of the most basic unreal translation from 'what we see' into the way an image is created using the same radiation we use for sight. Photography originally introduced itself to the world as an imperfect medium. Black and white, except to the few of us who are color-blind, is an inaccurate rendering of the world. But it's 'wrongness' is also 'photographic.'
EARLY COLOR: Wrong
Kodachrome? With all that warm glow and feeling? The nostalgic movie projector warmth of the 50s 60s and 70s we are all familiar with? WRONG WRONG WRONG. The color is unbalanced, incorrect and lovely. Old polaroids with their blocked up range and intense dye colors that reflect a reality more in tune with the mechanics of Polaroid dye than the replication of reality - WRONG.
Has the look of home video improved since color has been neutralized? Our current model home video recorder has more technical sophistication than the most professional equipment 15 years earlier. The color of ambient light used to be the domain of only professional motion shooters. Now, digital video will not only offer a continuous range of color tonalities, but automatically color correct for the color of the light itself. Both 'correct' functions automatically neutralize the environmental 'look' of a scene (shadows are blue, flourescents are green) on the assumption everyone wants "reality replication."
...AND ALL THAT OTHER STUFF
I'm not certain I want 100% accuracy on my home video, but the technical assumption of 'new and improved' along with the notion of 'more features is always better' feeds the endless march towards technical neutrality. Thankfully, we are headed to the top of a curve with digital capture technology. Film hasn't changed fundamentally in over a hundred years - just incremental improvements and a jump now and then (in color for example). I predict digital - now that it has achieved a technical proficiency - will plateau in a very similar way.
Regardless of whether new features are headed anywhere but towards the flattening of the plateau of digital capture, the impulse to front load these machines with as much as possible will always reign strong in the marketing department. Whether or not consumers would choose it themselves, the 'feature creep' of the industry dictates that to be competitive, you need to match feature for feature.
Never mind that the best camera equipment ever designed - Leica rangefinder, Yashica T4 - has the fewest features and represents the height of good design. My $40 home DVD player has more buttons than my cameras, and probably more features than most of my cameras - but it's absolute crap, because there is no 'heirarchy of usefulness.' The damn thing is a graphic layout of democratically appointed features. Good luck finding what's important.
THE GREEN C-PRINT
I spent my 20s producing my own work in darkrooms. I taught myself both black and white and color printing. I have done quite a lot of both. Most notably, during the ascension of digital capture in the late nineties, I spent a lot of time printing color prints from negatives, also known as "C-Prints."
I still produce images in the C-Print lab. The most striking characteristic of c-printing is how incredibly wrong you can be. No so in black and white - in black and white it may look 'washed out' or 'too dark.' In c-printing it can look like someone dropped a bottle of translucent nail polish on the surface of the print, your subject barely peering out through the incredible toxic haze.
The trick to correct c-printing is to 'neutralize' the film base. If you have ever looked at color film, you will notice that the color of the film itself is sometimes light yellow, sometimes a darker yellow, sometimes a deeper brownish.
The color printer must control the color of the light being shined through the film, to match the film in the opposite. In other words, the light you choose needs to neutralize the film base so the colors can be printed correctly.
Sometimes this process goes wrong - and sometimes certain scenes have a predominant 'color cast' that throws the film for a loop and makes it even more difficult to neutralize. In this example I was shooting the interior of the Staten Island Ferry and it was predominantly green.
As I was printing the dye in the film reacted strongly - the film was Fuji, which tends to be strong in the blue and green colors - so the way the subject reacted with the film had unanticipated strength. As I worked to make the print, I slowly realized the print I wanted to make was the 'wrong' print - or a print based on the look that was a collaboration of the film and subject. The resulting image I truly have a deep fondness for - intellectually and aesthetically. Sometimes 'wrong is right.'
I call this type of experience 'happy mistakes,' and it is exactly these kind of mistakes that can happen (in different ways) in Photoshop, but are more commonly lost among the many features and choices consumers seem to want, but not want to use.
PHOTOSHOP
Those who claim this issue is not important because you can always choose to apply a Photoshop filter to any image that is 'captured in neutral' are missing the point. Most users never go to those menus. More importantly, choosing a filter BEFORE capturing an interpretation of the subject is a way to 1) be committed to a way of seeing, 2) create unexpected results and 3)use the interpretative 'wrongness' of film to create a flattering outcome.
[NOTE: Some of the more forward thinking software, namely CaptureOne Pro (The interface program that has ironically enabled lesser digital capture gear to operate professionally) out of Denmark, I believe, offers the user the ability to stylize the capture according to an aesthetic chosen by the photographer/user. With this model, all incoming captures are interpreted according to those specifications.]
The most compelling Photoshop filters are all based on the historical 'wrongness' of photographic capture. From basic black and white (total color blindness), to the historical answer to warming up B+W to make it more flattering (sepia), to the stylization of Andy Warhol imagery used in Mac's 'photobooth'(in this case ripping off a silkscreen/photo style), to photoshopping images to have a Polaroid or Kodachrome feel, or making new movie footage with a warm, historical color cast.
All of these styles can be applied in "post," if you know what you're going for. Knowing what you're going for is in no small part a result of being in physical proximity of these types of images. So more commonly, the history of photography - the processes that have made photography compelling and not just a boring 'reality replicator,' are left in a historical lock box: the pull down menu called 'Filters' on the top of the screen. Not much of a presence for the entire history of photographic aesthetics to occupy in a program supposedly dedicated to photographic art form.
