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Don't Be Bound By Others Constraints

January 27th, 2022

Don

Digital Art. Artography. Photoshopping. Whatever you call it, it's a topic that comes up fairly often on Facebook photography groups and other places where photography is discussed and critiqued. Someone posts a photo, and almost apologetically admits that it's been manipulated in editing and no longer resembles what came out of camera. Does that make it bad? Is it sacrilege? Is it still a photograph? Or, is it art?

There are purists who believe this is none of the above, but I think most of us fall somewhere in the middle. Post is a critical step in the entire photographic workflow. Ansel Adams was known for push processing, a technique to pull out the contrast in the sky. Today, editing software makes this incredibly easy, in fact, one can replace the whole sky if they wanted. While the great Ansel did not have these modern tools at his disposal, we can certainly thank him for expanding the way we take and make photographs today. Ansel was not constrained by the boundaries or rules of others. Thank goodness for that.

If you are observant (and photographers are), you will find those who are really good at this have developed a very distinct style. It's like a guitar player that may not think of themselves as the best overall guitar player, but they have a style that's hard for others to replicate. It's individual.

"Mallards In The Mist" was quite literally the result of an editing mishap. It's not the best representation of "artography" and I was not comfortable posting it. Yet, I did. If this is your goal, don't be bound by others constraints, real or perceived.

That's how I see it.

Cathy Grassello