Confessions of a Purist.
The fact of the matter is that I am a purist. Call me silly, call me pretentious, call me anything you want, but I genuinely believe in taking photos for what they are as opposed to staging them or altering them.
When you take a photograph and you superimpose something that isn’t there or you layer multiple images together you are absolutely creating works of art. You are not, however, practicing photography. You are taking part in something called photo manipulation. With that being said, I wholeheartedly understand that photo manipulation is an art in and of itself. However, to attempt to lump them all into the same category is like trying to say that rapping and singing opera are the same thing. While you will likely find both on my Spotify playlist… they’re even remotely not the same. In the same sense, photography and photo manipulation are two very distinct art forms that should be appreciated individually.
A perfect example of what I mean by ‘photo manipulation’ can be seen in this video by Mike over at North Borders. I love the channel and his laid back vibe (is this an Aussie thing?) but he made it very clear that they are, in fact, two different things. In the video, he shows off this admittedly cool software that seems do a really great job at utilizing artificial intelligence to almost instantaneously swap out your boring sky for a much more dramatic or moody one. As great as the shots look at the end of the day, I don’t ultimately believe that this falls under photography in its traditional sense.
What’s really interesting to me though, is asking the question, “where do we draw the line of distinction between photography and photo manipulation?” This is a really tough one to answer. Great photographers often use products like Adobe Lightroom to adjust various settings such as exposure, contrast, clarity, texture, and more. But aside from these normal adjustments, Lightroom also provides the flexibility to change colors! THIS image is a perfect example. Notice how the greens became orange and the blue skies became more of a teal? This isn’t realistic, but it absolutely is artistic! I’m not opposed to using Lightroom to its full potential to create the best images you can, but this is definitely a bit of a gray area between photography and photo manipulation.
For me particularly, I just find photography as an art extremely challenging and gratifying all at the same time. There is something to be said about framing the perfect shot, exposing it perfectly, getting tack sharp focus, and fully capturing the scene that just blows your mind.
Cheers!
-MA
