How Much Do You Fiddle With the Image?

How Much Do You Fiddle?

My wife and I get into a discussion on a moderately regular basis about how much you manipulate the world around you making it somewhat different from reality. This includes flooring, using real wood as opposed to laminate, creating a wall that looks like stone but really isn’t and of course just how much do you post process an image before it no longer looks like what the naked eye actually saw?
I argue that manipulating images has a long and honoured past. Ansel Adams, whose photography is iconic, was a master at dodging and burning in the dark room. ( http://www.amazon.com/Print-Ansel-Adams-Photography-Book/dp/0821221876/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1389104670&sr=8-10&keywords=Ansel+Adams) Mr. Adams was also very good at manipulating exposure perhaps being the first person to write about the Zone System. (http://www.amazon.com/Negative-Ansel-Adams-Photography-Book/dp/0821221868/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389105042&sr=1-1&keywords=Ansel+Adams+the+Zone+System) One could argue correctly that Mr. Adams was a master manipulator and the results speak for themselves.
A second issue that modern digital photography has brought to us is the ability of the camera to do a certain amount of post processing at the time the image is captured. JPEG files, the most common file type used in camera, are processed and the camera often gives the photographer a variety of choices about sharpness, saturation, luminance, contrast, white balance etc. In some respects the argument about processing vs not processing is moot.
I used to carry my camera with me in hopes of getting serendipitous images that were worth hanging on my (or someone else’s) wall. While I still have my camera with me I spend a great deal of time now planning what I am wanting to take with a picture already formed in my mind and it is this mental picture that I push the newly captured image towards using the software tools now available to us. At times the captured images need very little manipulation. Often however the conditions that I would have liked for an image did not exist when I got to the location in spite of planning. As a result I am not above replacing a sky, using adjustment masks to change lighting, using gradient tools or anyone of the tools available in Photoshop or software like it.
The amount of fiddling I do is determined by what my mind’s eye saw before the image was taken. An example of the kind of thinking I do could be illustrated by a recent trip to Lake Louise in Banff National Park Canada. This may be one of the most photographed lakes in the world and it’s a place that I have repeatedly visited over the years. I was there most recently on January 1st of 2014 with my family. During the winter in the high mountains scenes are very Monochromatic and at these latitudes the sun has a rough time getting high enough during the day to provide sun light to the lake itself. There can be at times very dramatic skies and cloud in mid-day with the sun just peaking over the southern rim of the mountain ramparts that protect the lake from the south. It was this that I wanted to capture and I also wanted to warm up the sky while improving the colour of the rock and glaciers.
To do this I relied on 3-image HDR series taken from a tripod and in some cases I used Photomatix 5’s new process where a single RAW file can be milked for all the necessary data to produce good HDR results. (http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/philipkaren-rispin.html?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=346248)
So my conclusion is that manipulation is important particularly if you want to produce something that you find pleasing and matches your view of the image you wish to create.

Phil R.