Posted by freediver 5 days ago
I guess I'm wondering what's the goal of making these kinds of picture? If it's just to produce the output, why not combine separate photos so you can get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want without having to find them co-occurring naturally? If it's to follow some kind of rules for not cheating, why not do no hand-editing in software?
Let's say I took a picture of a old man beating a child with a cane.
In the video version of the photo I zoom out, and it's clearly a stage performance.
Or I take a picture of a man frowning in front of a demolished home.
In the video version the man happened to be walking by a construction of a new home and I said something to get his attention and snapped the photo on moody black and white film.
Framing is curating reality and you can evoke certain emotions or messages simply by what you choose to keep in and leave out of your frame.
This has been a concern people have had for years. You might benefit from reading Susan Sontag's essay On Photography - https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Sontag-Susan-Photography.p...
My take, as soon as you pick up a camera to capture a scene you are telling a story and incorporating your own bias. For this reason, once I learned how cameras worked and dabbled in photography as an amateur it really transformed how I consume media. You could have the same subject and scene but tell a completely different story depending on the decisions you make as a photographer.
What if they were joined together by exposing 2 different overlapping film negatives?
You may enjoy "Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop"
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Faking_it/nGvTg_HC32YC?...
> get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want
Digital painting? Too difficult, maybe just use Firefly "Adobe's online AI image generator" ;-)
Eyes are subjective. The goal of manual post processing is often to make an image that replicates what the photographer saw, which is rarely possible with the automatic processing the camera does.
(Image data is always processed. No human can see raw photon counts.)
In these cases, it's clearly not to replicate what the photographer saw with his unaided eyes because he wouldn't have been able to see such detail so far away. Is it to replicate what he saw through the viewfinder?
A lot of photographers here. Do you guys impose some kind of personal restrictions on what types of processing or instruments you use to make it "honest" or not-cheating? How does that work?
When it comes to visual experiences, it is meaningless to talk about "honesty" because they are so subjective. That's one of the greatest joys of looking at other photographers' interpretations of familiar subjects: they see things so differently.
Restrictions on processing make sense, but they are not easy rules, because they depend on the purpose of the image. I suspect the most restricted are people in news -- they operate on similar principles as those who write the articles. In other words, there are no forbidden technical procedures, but the end product must effectively convey a real-world event (from some perspective -- news is always biased.)
One can still choose to deliberately misrepresent something that is subjective.
The experience is bigger than "saw".
Is it to hint at what they felt?
Later, looking at a purely-2d-visual representation is a different kind of experience than being there.
Contrary to many beginning photographers' instincts, a short to medium telephoto lens best allows the photographer to capture the point or points of interest and keep the distractions out of the frame.
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/
is that the wide angle can make distracting things like power lines look really small in context and not so bothersome the way they are with moderate focal length lenses. Also I think very wide lenses can capture some of that panorama effect: I live near a state forest that I think is strikingly beautiful but most lenses can only capture a tiny bit of it, yeah you can get a flower or a bug or something, but be it a 20mm or a 200mm any attempt to go beyond macro photography falls flat.
The compression effect a telephoto has can be used even more dramatically to tie together different planes in a scene
Its the fact that you are far away from the subject that compresses distances.
Once you have decided on the constraint to use a telephoto (to compress distances), you then move yourself away (as the article said) from the scene to be shot so that it fits the zoom factor. The relatives distances are what makes the compression, not the glass inside the lens. You could also take a wide picture and make a digital crop.
> effect a telephoto has
They're saying that it is not a property of the lens, but rather of the perspective of the scene viewed from a distance. You'd get the same effect using any focal length lens, taking the shot from the same location, and cropping appropriately.
Perhaps in contrast to depth of field which is a property of the lens.
I'm looking at the portraits of the woman on the beach and I'm not understanding how to get from one to the other with cropping. What am I missing?
They could have used the 35mm lens at the same distance as the 150mm lens and simply cropped and the perspective compression would be the same (it'd just be a lower resolution image).
Of course, on many cameras you then would get a smudgy or pixelated mess.
Edit0: Obviously you're also see the thing you're trying to get a picture of better
What you're describing as correct is what people understand. Of course it's the fact that you're far away. I think it goes without saying that you can't use a telephoto lens inside of a room or something.
And yes, of course you could take a wide picture and make a crop. But the resolution would be terrible. The whole point of a telephoto lens is to take that tiny crop of your environment at full resolution.
I'm sorry you learned it wrong at age 14 and maybe wherever you got it from really did explain it badly. But it's standard for professionals to talk about the effect of a long lens in this way, that the camera will be further away.
Of course analog zoom > crop, but only because reality < theory.
Anyway, I'd say you're technically correct but you might miss some angles and have some holes in the resulting images. But now with gaussian splats and AI we could reconstruct holes easily
Also, satellites photographing the Earth do it by moving the camera, and they can produce compression effects beyond what you'd get just because of their distance.