# DOF Vs. Focus Stacking?



## N1kon1k (May 3, 2017)

Hey guys as I learn more about photography? The more demanding and critical of my shots I become... it's getting to the point that I almost forget to have fun with it and scrutinize every aspect of the shot lol... 
I know I'm very meticulous and harsh on myself but lately I started struggling with sharpness on my photos... 

Camera D750
Lens 24mm-120mm F4 

The camera is great... lens is pretty sharp

But my struggle seems to whether I need to focus on the foreground? Or further up the foreground because depth of field will tend to extend both beyond and before the focus point?

I have been reading on front to back sharpness and a lot of people focus stack 4/5 images for better sharpness throughout? 

My problem with this? Is that often times you're dealing with things in motion, and will make you spend more time in post and give you bad habits on site... 

How do you guys normally deal with this in landscape?


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## Ysarex (May 3, 2017)

Hyperfocal distance and small f/stop so tripod if necessary.

Joe


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## Derrel (May 3, 2017)

Focus where the composition NEEDS to be the sharpest! Sometimes the middle ground needs maximum clarity and sharpness; other times, the Infinty region must be sharpest; at times, it is the closer-in areas that need to be the sharpest. *Compose photos as they need to be composed. *If necessary, stop the lens down to f/8,f/9,f/10,/11, f/13, whatever aperture is needed, and do some focus bracketing if you are unsure. (Shoot multiple frames with altered focus points!)

Often times, a slight movement of the focus point can change the photo. MANY times, the far-far distance can be a little bit OOF, and we EXPECT that! Watch for areas of high-frequency detail: if those areas are soft, the entire image might seem "soft".

Learn how to focus "stopped down", the old way. Practice. Compose photos based on ideas of near/far relationships. Learn how to use an OOF foreground.

Or...focus stack and make everything look like a digital postcard.

There is no right or wrong answer; focus stacking was NEVER an option when I learned how to shoot photos; if we absolutely needed to, we could used a camera with movements to get extreme DOF, but for many,many,many images, the answer was a tripod, and carefully placing the focus point and whatever DOF band there was.


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## petrochemist (May 4, 2017)

Focus stacking is a technique introduced for use with microscopes where the DOF often doesn't reach a thousandth of an inch.  It gives a significant advantage in macro photography too, but is rarely needed in landscape work.


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## jsecordphoto (May 4, 2017)

I focus stack often because I want tack sharp focus front to back in my scene. Shooting ultra wide (15mm), it's not needed as often because depth of field is quite large at f8-11, but depending on the scene and how close I am to foreground objects I'll still focus stack shooting ultra wide. 

Some people will say hyperfocal will work fine, but that's to get "acceptable" focus from front to back. Printing large, I'd prefer to get everything tack sharp where anything even remotely close to out of focus will be apparent.


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## pgriz (May 4, 2017)

Alternatively, get a view camera with adjustable bellows.  

Focus stacking, at whatever focal length, is do-able with static scenes.  Not so good with motion.  Unless you take each shot using speedlights, which would "freeze" the motion, but you can't be sure the bits in motion will be in the same place on successive frames.  

Technical stuff aside, when the hobby is no longer fun, I'd say you're overtraining.  But that's for you to decide - are you doing it so that you can get a spectacular image that you're happy to show people, or are you doing it because you really, really like solving technical challenges (in which case, the photo is almost incidental).  Most viewers will have no idea of what you set out to accomplish and will consider your photo to be good if they can relate to it.


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## smoke665 (May 4, 2017)

Derrel said:


> Or...focus stack and make everything look like a digital postcard.



There are those who I guess would like the hyper realistic look,  but my personal opinion is that an image can portray so much more.


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## smoke665 (May 4, 2017)

pgriz said:


> Focus stacking, at whatever focal length, is do-able with static scenes. Not so good with motion.



Without a magic wand that can stop the wind from blowing, the birds from flying and everything else, there's no way to eliminate all the motion. Even when doing Pixel Shifts of landscapes, (which is 4 quick images in succession) if you take in a very large view, there's no way to completely overcome the motion blur.


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## pgriz (May 4, 2017)

Keep in mind that sharpness is overrated.  In certain cases, it adds to the image.  In other cases, motion or focus blur, deliberate over/under exposure, and other techniques can do a better job of creating visually engaging images.  I suspect that all photographers go through a seeking of maximum sharpness phase.  However, if the image is about engaging the emotion of the viewer, then there are more effective tools - and deliberate lack of sharpness is one of them.


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## jsecordphoto (May 4, 2017)

Focus stacking can be tough on windy days, but something like birds flying, which was mentioned above, won't matter at all. Your last frame for the sky will be at infinity anyway, and you'll only be using the last frame for your sky.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but having out of focus foregrounds looks unprofessional and weird to me. This is talking about for landscapes only obviously. I find that my print customers don't care at all what technical stuff I had to do in order to get a photo, but they'll definitely mention it looking weird if everything is sharp except for a key area in your shot (foreground). I don't see what's "hyper-realistic" about having the entire scene be sharp, the same way your eyes would see it (unless in person you held a leaf an inch away from your eye and expected something at 50ft away be in focus)


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## The_Traveler (May 4, 2017)

pgriz said:


> Keep in mind that sharpness is overrated. In certain cases, it adds to the image. In other cases, motion or focus blur, deliberate over/under exposure, and other techniques can do a better job of creating visually engaging images. *I suspect that all photographers go through a seeking of maximum sharpness phase.* However, if the image is about engaging the emotion of the viewer, then there are more effective tools - and deliberate lack of sharpness is one of them.



I couldn't agree more. If you like the look of hyper-sharp and those kinds of images really turn you on, then go for it. I  don't remember photographers because their images are sharp but because their images were emotionally or intellectually engaging.

I think that many people look at sharpness as an early goal because sharpness has a clear and defined  end point; it is attainable. With all the very ambiguous goals in photography, sharpness stands out as understandable and achievable with technical means; sharpness doesn't seem to require enormous talent or taste.

Someone who values sharpness can buy stuff, learn techniques and his/her improvement is even measurable. That's comforting to new photographers.


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## N1kon1k (May 4, 2017)

really appreciate everyone's input, I know this is not a thread to post photos but I'm just using this shot as an example... I struggled with the shot for like a Half hour and than waited for an hour until the sun finally dropped exactly where I wanted... 

But in doing this obviously light became the next challenge because I ended up bracketing 5 shots in 5 different exposures... in my eyes I feel like the shot is not really tack sharp but just acceptably sharp... 
 In the end I ended up not happy with it... and I think also because composition is off too which I tend to struggle with...


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## Ysarex (May 4, 2017)

N1kon1k said:


> View attachment 139330 really appreciate everyone's input, I know this is not a thread to post photos but I'm just using this shot as an example... I struggled with the shot for like a Half hour and than waited for an hour until the sun finally dropped exactly where I wanted...
> 
> But in doing this obviously light became the next challenge because I ended up bracketing 5 shots in 5 different exposures... in my eyes I feel like the shot is not really tack sharp but just acceptably sharp...
> In the end I ended up not happy with it... and I think also because composition is off too which I tend to struggle with...



I think you're being over critical and expecting too much. I'd say the sharpness is appropriate given you're using a zoom lens and a camera with an AA filter. I think your focus placement is good. The photo can be rendered sharper with software if you like.

Joe

P.S. Here's a link to your photo with medium frequency separation sharpening: landscape


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## greybeard (May 4, 2017)

What you are seeing is diffraction from using f/22 at 24mm.  I don't know enough about diffraction to really explain it but, I do know that once you get past f/11 or so it starts giving everything a slight blur.  Focus stacking at say f/8 will give you sharper results but, it has its pitfalls like anything else.  I like your photo and if it were sharper, it would not heighten its' emotional impact for me and it may even detract from it.


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## pgriz (May 4, 2017)

A graduated ND filter will help to decrease the difference in apparent brightness between the sky and the ground.  In general, the brightness difference between the sky and the foreground will be in the 3-4 stop range.  Having a 2 or 3 stop graduated ND filter with a hard transition (if the line separating the "bright" and "dark" is thin and straight) or a softer transition, will give you the ability to capture the scene with a minimum of shots (usually one for the foreground and one for the background will be enough).  Something like the app The Photographer's Ephemeris (A shot planned with TPE) will help you figure out both your positioning and your timing.  As for your shot being "tack sharp", it's sharp enough to my eyes on my screen.  

Another thing to consider is having dramatic clouds in your images often takes a very good image to a completely different level.  You can't control clouds, so it becomes a matter of anticipation, and being there at the right time.


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## pgriz (May 4, 2017)

greybeard said:


> What you are seeing is diffraction from using f/22 at 24mm.  I don't know enough about diffraction to really explain it but, I do know that once you get past f/11 or so it starts giving everything a slight blur.  Focus stacking at say f/8 will give you sharper results but, it has its pitfalls like anything else.  I like your photo and most people would be perfectly satisfied with it.



This is a valid and important point.  Diffraction is both aperture and sensor dependent.  With my set-up (Canon APS sensor) anything past f/16 shows more and more obvious diffraction.  So part of the game is to use enough aperture to get you the depth of field you need, but not more than that, as using higher apertures will make the diffraction more and more visible.  Try this link to get a better handle on this phenomenon: (Diffraction Limited Photography: Pixel Size, Aperture and Airy Disks).


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## The_Traveler (May 5, 2017)

jsecordphoto said:


> I don't see what's "hyper-realistic" about having the entire scene be sharp, the same way your eyes would see it (unless in person you held a leaf an inch away from your eye and expected something at 50ft away be in focus)



Our eyes constantly refocus and don't have a remarkable depth of field - and we are aware of that. What is so impressive about high definition, deep depth of field images is exactly that; they are different from what we see just because seemingly everything is in focus and thus there is a feeling of _hyper_-reality.


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## smoke665 (May 5, 2017)

The_Traveler said:


> they are different from what we see just because seemingly everything is in focus and thus there is a feeling of _hyper_-reality



A photo is two dimensional where depth is a simulated illusion compared to the three dimensional world we live where depth is real. _"Hyperreality"_ is the inability of conscious mind to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, but as you point out, because of that third dimension (depth), the eye is incapable of focusing both near and far at the same time, therefore any printed image which purports to show everything in focus at once would be an incongruity to the conscious mind.  Therefore this type of photo would be more aptly described as an _"Augmented Reality".  _Something I also misstated in a previous post when I used "hyper realistic". A more accurate example of a "_Hyperreality"_, image would be a 3D or holographic image where the conscious mind is actually fooled by the addition of depth and no longer able to discern it is a simulation.


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## N1kon1k (May 5, 2017)

This forum is great... I really enjoy asking a question and receiving so many responses/opinions in which they all teach you something new and put things in perspective...

Like @pgriz stated sharpness is something that can be attained, and I guess this is why I'm trying to "attain" the goal... not necessarily because it needs to be done in every single photo, but because I would like to be able to "Know How" 

I still consider myself very new to photography after 3 years of going out every weekend and practice... and I am just trying to learn as much technique and as many technical aspects of photography as possible so that when a situation calls for it? I will not have to think twice about it and it will come natural... 

@jsecordphoto he also pointed something very insteresting on big prints... although sharpness may not be as noticeable in a smaller print or web, I'm sure it would be very different when presenting the shot to a customer... 

One thing I find very interesting around where I live is that people don't seem to see photography as an art form and don't appreciate it as much as blobs of paint splattered on a canvas "called abstract"

In the end experience and practice it's what's going to marry everything together... lol


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## jsecordphoto (May 5, 2017)

I still maintain that sharpness is extremely important when shooting landscapes. Maybe the "sharpness is overrated" thing is valid for some forms of photography- but the only time I've ever heard it was on message boards, never from other landscape photographers. Can't say I've ever heard it from any wildlife photographers either...


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## N1kon1k (May 5, 2017)

From reading and watching so many things on photography I can firmly say that photography in the end has to be taken with a grain of salt... I feel like some principles need to be exercised For a photo to work but in the end how you post process it's up to a personal taste... in the end I feel like if you can sell your work and make a good living equals success


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## smoke665 (May 5, 2017)

N1kon1k said:


> For a photo to work but in the end how you post process it's up to a personal taste...



Not necessarily,  the reality is the "end result" is dependent on everything you do "before you take the shot". Post processing should be the clean up phase, not the creative stage, unless you're doing a composite or other creative work.


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## jsecordphoto (May 5, 2017)

smoke665 said:


> N1kon1k said:
> 
> 
> > For a photo to work but in the end how you post process it's up to a personal taste...
> ...



Gotta disagree with you there. Creativity has had a place in the darkroom (and digital darkroom) since Ansel Adams and before him. Doing things like dodging and burning to shift the viewers eye and enhance light has been a practice for a long time.


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## smoke665 (May 5, 2017)

@jsecordphoto  This bone's been gnawed on before on this forum and others. For a photographer (not a graphic artist) the creativity begins the moment the photographer see's something that catches his eye. From that point the creativity is a series of choices on everything from lens, exposure, framing, light, etc. leading up to the point of clicking the shutter. If the photographer got it right the creativity is over, it's SOOC to on the wall. Since I rarely am that perfect, for me it involves cleaning up. Burning, Dodging, cloning, and adjusting are all parts of improving the image that was already "created" at the time the shutter was pushed.  To often I think people take a somewhat lazy approach before the shutter clicks, with the belief that they'll "correct it post". If you're going to do that, why bother with taking the photo, just compile a database trees, rocks, sky, people, etc. and make your own scene, that's what a graphic artist does.

I also think you're missing some great opportunities as an artist if you limit yourself to only tack sharp images. Look at these landscapes from Andrew S. Gray  http://andrewsgray.photography/galleries/latest/ I could find others, but I thought his work illustrated the point that there's more than just sharp.


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## Overread (May 5, 2017)

Sharpness tends to get people all riled up about nothing. 


Mostly because some people worry that new photographers focus on it too much; that they are aiming for technical perfection at the expense of their artistic creativity; and that hunting down extreme sharpness causes them to throw away photos that otherwise would be perfectly fine.

Part of this is a reaction to avoid that extremist angle - which is somewhat overblown as technical prowess is part of the creative learning curve - because by attaining technical competency one is more able to be creative. Without it you can see great shots; have great ideas and achieve non of them. 
Someone earlier said that they don't remember sharp photos because they are sharp; but I bet those great photos were sharp where it counts and when it needed to be. 


Another part is mystery. Sharpness IS a mystery because we tend to onyl see web-resized photos online which are very easy to sharpen. Heck you can get some really soft fullsize shots and sharpen them up great for web display. This tends to mean that we see a lot of very sharp photos online - it also means that people get worried that all this sharpening they are doing isn't what others are doing - that htey are oversharpening to compensate for lack of skill. 

Equipment comes into it too as like it or not higher end higher priced gear DOES produce sharper results at a wider range of aperture values (in general although the diffraction limit is often about the same so long  as the camera used is the same). 



In my view its perfectly fine to learn and talk about sharpness. Chasing it isn't a waste of time - indeed learning how to get tack sharp shots every time; to get it sharp when you want it etc.... is a great part of learning. Sure it shouldn't be your only thought but its not bad if its a prime motivator for you. 


Focus stacking is certainly a means to an end and I bet if this were a macro thread instead of a landscape everyone would be encouraging the OP  and this discussion would not have gone the way it has into a slight meta-talk about correct learning approach and the like. Indeed focus-stacking is a fantastic example of "niche thinking"

Done in macro or as part of astrophotography its accepted as totally normal; skilled but great for achieving otherwise impossible results. Bring it into other genres and some get confused why you'd do that or feel as if its a cop-out of other established methods - or any one of a hundred other viewpoints.
Part of this is niche thinking - that false concept of ascribing certain skills or methods to be restricted to certain situations and subjects as dictated by popularity of used of the method in those interests.


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## The_Traveler (May 5, 2017)

smoke665 said:


> Post processing should be the clean up phase, not the creative stage, unless you're doing a composite or other creative work.



This is a very, very narrow way of looking at things.
Ansel Adams did a lot of post processing because Nature did not always agree with the photographer's view of what looks good.


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## smoke665 (May 5, 2017)

The_Traveler said:


> This is a very, very narrow way of looking at things.
> Ansel Adams did a lot of post processing because Nature did not always agree with the photographer's view of what looks good.



Only if you take my comment out of context. The post I was commenting on seemed to imply that creativity came from post processing, if that's the case then again why bother with the photograph, just create an image from a composite of parts. As to Adams, like any artist his vision, his creation, was already formed in his mind when he clicked the shutter, whether he improved on it later in the darkroom is irrelevant.


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## jsecordphoto (May 5, 2017)

smoke665 said:


> @jsecordphoto  This bone's been gnawed on before on this forum and others. For a photographer (not a graphic artist) the creativity begins the moment the photographer see's something that catches his eye. From that point the creativity is a series of choices on everything from lens, exposure, framing, light, etc. leading up to the point of clicking the shutter. If the photographer got it right the creativity is over, it's SOOC to on the wall. Since I rarely am that perfect, for me it involves cleaning up. Burning, Dodging, cloning, and adjusting are all parts of improving the image that was already "created" at the time the shutter was pushed.  To often I think people take a somewhat lazy approach before the shutter clicks, with the belief that they'll "correct it post". If you're going to do that, why bother with taking the photo, just compile a database trees, rocks, sky, people, etc. and make your own scene, that's what a graphic artist does.
> 
> I also think you're missing some great opportunities as an artist if you limit yourself to only tack sharp images. Look at these landscapes from Andrew S. Gray  http://andrewsgray.photography/galleries/latest/ I could find others, but I thought his work illustrated the point that there's more than just sharp.



Guess we'll agree to disagree. To me there are no images that I'd ever share SOOC, a raw file requires processing. While I'm not much for over the top processing, I'm certainly no purist. 

Btw those images do absolutely nothing for me. I've seen ICM images that are great, and of course everyone has different tastes, but I can't say I liked any of the images on his site- I've seen countless photos like that from people just trying too hard to be artsy.


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## unpopular (May 5, 2017)

smoke665 said:


> @jsecordphotoIf the photographer got it right the creativity is over, it's SOOC to on the wall.



Correction: if the software engineers at Canon/Sony/Nikon/Leica/Hasselblad got it right. I am assuming you don't know what an image look like SOOC. Well. Let's start with linear gamma. It's also green with no perceivable color information. It also appears vastly under-exposed. Not just a little, but a lot (again, linear gamma). Oh. And all the RGB pixels aren't composed into a color, so it has a checkered appearance. And there's an extra green pixel that our brain has no frickin clue what to do with. Oh. And there is no white balance in a digital exposure. That's entirely done in processing ... good thing the image is green.

In other words, SOOC doesn't really mean anything. It represents only slightly more than an undeveloped sheet of film.

@smoke665 you make it sound so easy. I'm a visual effects artist. All day I make scenes that were shot on location look like they take place in the civil war. I add mortar blasts and dirt hits. I make blood spray out of soldiers (which is pretty ridiculous honestly, but, it's entertainment). I erase modern buildings, power cables, people in baseball caps who are found wandering around b-roll footage. I add caskets and wooden crates and dead bodies. Sometimes it woks out, sometimes I'm just glad the forty frames I've been staring at for the last two hours lasts only a seconds on TV. And the fact that we spend hours on a few frames should say something about how fixing it in post amounts to being "lazy".

No. It's not "easy", but it is cheaper to pay a junior VFX artist to do it than to rent props or send a camera man through a practical explosion SFX. It turns out that Camera operators don't like being blown up (nor would whoever owns the $30K cameras)

My point is that yes, maybe there are some newbies out there with an attitude that it'd just be easier to "fix in post"; shows like CSI make it look easy: just press the "enhance" button. But I think everyone who has this attitude eventually realizes that it's not that simple. It's FAR easier to capture the data you need to make the image than try to create it after. Eventually, anyone serious about photography will realize that they can't hide behind instagram filters forever. Their images suck on a fundamental level, and even the look that they're going for ultimately can't be achieved without good data.

NOW. I say "good data" because the image your camera records is not a "good exposure" to the eye. This is super important when you're talking about image processing. SOOC, without any post-exposure correction is not color balanced, has no color profile, and in a linear gamma. Looking at it without any understanding about how image processing works, you'd assume it's *totally* unusable.

Of course, it can be argued that the camera and raw processing software attempts to correct this in a way that resembled what our eye naturally sees - but if we're going to be super objective about it - our eyes are pretty lousy optically-speaking and if it weren't for our brain "post processing" the signal off our retina my $25 chinese c-mount lens is more accurate. Really, have you tried to pay attention to the OOF region of our vision? It is difficult, but if you really pay attention, the bokeh isn't "creamy", it's *terrible*. And what can you expect from such a small aperture being focused through a liquid filled with crap? The laws of physics apply to our eyes as well.

Photography isn't about recording what is *there* it's about recording what we *see*. While our eye's lens is REALLY, REALLY bad, the camera system is pretty good, and the raw processor is about the best thing we have available to us. No camera can record the amount of color depth that our eye sees, nor can it process what's important and ignore the rest. To do that, we have to compress tones, dodge and burn, apply LUT curves... And even when we try our best to replicate with scientific precision the qualitative natural gamma of vision, it frequently doesn't work out.

That's why Adams developed the zone system, and why digital photographers everywhere unknowingly apply it. A good exposure is not one that looks good SOOC, or even one that looks good according to camera software engineers.

It's one that gathers enough information about that scene to allow the photographer to express what he or she saw. And if the photographer perceives a subject in crystal-sharp detail beyond the physical capabilities of the lens, who am I to say their vision is wrong?


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## unpopular (May 5, 2017)

And let's not forget about ETTR either, a process first essentially developed by Ansel Adams before being adapted to digital.

Only in his day you never saw your N+3 negatives developed out normally.

If you're shooting SOOC and not using ETTR then you're using only about 1/3 of your cameras dynamic range in many cases, which is already significantly limited as compared to human vision.

So right out of the gate you're further from the goal of emulating vision by rejecting a large chunk of luma that the eye had seen at time of exposure.

Is good photography then exclusively dependent on the subject being illuminated in a way that fits within the usable range that the camera can record under "normal" processing? Is the skill of the photographer to be measured entirely by how diffused the light happens to be on a given day?

I'm 99.9% sure that Adams would disagree. It takes FAR more skill to compensate for difficult lighting conditions in a way that includes how it is to be processed than to be so tightly bound by specific lighting conditions.

Complaining about "bad light" is a true sign of a lazy photographer.


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

This thread has been sort of a trip down memory lane for me.  When I first began doing commercial studio photography (early '70s), I often fooled around to see what my equipment was capable of.

Then, as now, I was a Nikon shooter, with the occasional foray into medium and large format photography for certain assignments.  I had just procured what I believe was Nikon's first zoom lens, their 85-250mm f4.0-4.5 (circa 1959).  It had already been supplanted by their much smaller and lighter 80-200mm f4.5, another push-pull zoom which was quite popular in its day.  However, the older lens was a monster.  Well over a foot long, plus the hood, and nearly 4.5 lbs.; oddly, a walkaround lens at the time, nearly as big and heavy as my present day 200-500mm zoom.  But I digress.

So, I wanted to see if I could photograph this lens close-up from the front, while keeping everything from the lens hood to the camera body in sharp focus, which was seemingly impossible.  Undeterred, I whipped out my Linhof 4x5 view camera and gave it a shot.  Nowadays, many would use focus stacking to achieve a similar result, but the technique didn't exist then.  Here's the result, scanned from an 11x14 print, as I'd lost the negative over the years:






I've always been sort of a sharpness nut, often preferring to let the viewer decide where to look, rather than leading them by the nose.  While I will use depth of field for creative or contextual effect, I often strive for universal focus, as in the following image, where it was important to me to keep the two small plants at the lower right in focus, since they represented the only life in the scene:





My point is (I suppose) that I've never actually needed to focus stack, even when shooting macro, since there always seems to be an optical path to the depth of field that I need.  Note the tiny bug in the picture below, smaller than the head of a pin:





All in all, while focus stacking has its place for many photographers, there's still something to be said for aperture control and hyperfocal shooting.


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## thereyougo! (May 6, 2017)

jsecordphoto said:


> I focus stack often because I want tack sharp focus front to back in my scene. Shooting ultra wide (15mm), it's not needed as often because depth of field is quite large at f8-11, but depending on the scene and how close I am to foreground objects I'll still focus stack shooting ultra wide.
> 
> Some people will say hyperfocal will work fine, but that's to get "acceptable" focus from front to back. Printing large, I'd prefer to get everything tack sharp where anything even remotely close to out of focus will be apparent.



The thing is if you are printing large, acceptable sharpness is still (ahem) acceptable if you are viewing it at an appropriate distance.  The larger the print, the further you should view it from.  I've occasionally thought about focus stacking, but hate having to spend too long on processing and my files take up enough space on my hard drive as it is!


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## smoke665 (May 6, 2017)

@unpopular again taking my comments out of context. I neither denied that editing post is a necessity (for me especially) nor that digital art is easy. But to pull a line from your post _" the fact that we spend hours on a few frames should say something about how fixing it in post"._ So why would any photographer, especially those that do it for a living want to spend hours editing every single frame? They'd never have any time for new business, and no way they could charge enough. There are many "really good" photographers on this forum alone, who post daily, photos with only minimal editing in post. Is that SOOC, no, not by your definition, but it's pretty close.

I don't mean to be disrespectful in any way, because while it's obvious you have way more than a layman knowledge of digital processing, I'm reminded of a quote from the movie Tommy Boy that sort of explains my view of a lot of things that take place in this world, where he says "I can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking my head up a bull's ........, but I rather take the butchers word for it." My current camera model manipulates and produces an image file in ways I only vaguely understand, but that's ok, because I only need to know what the end result is of the various options available.

Here's another thing I was taught years ago in a programming class - "garbage in-garbage out", that applies equally to a digital file. To imply that creativity is only created post would be to also "limit" your view of the artist.



jsecordphoto said:


> Guess we'll agree to disagree. To me there are no images that I'd ever share SOOC, a raw file requires processing. While I'm not much for over the top processing, I'm certainly no purist.
> 
> Btw those images do absolutely nothing for me. I've seen ICM images that are great, and of course everyone has different tastes, but I can't say I liked any of the images on his site- I've seen countless photos like that from people just trying too hard to be artsy.



I'm not sure we disagree as much as you might believe. As an artist, I'd never knock you technique or your view, merely trying to illustrate that any singular element should never be the "only" element but a a part of a composition that is worthy of consideration. As to the example, some of his work I like, some I don't, but what a boring world this would be if everyone liked the same thing.


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## N1kon1k (May 6, 2017)

smoke665 said:


> N1kon1k said:
> 
> 
> > For a photo to work but in the end how you post process it's up to a personal taste...
> ...


@smoke665 

Perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly.... what I meant by my comment... was that I like to go out and spend the time outdoors and practice and achieve the shot on site... minimizing the errors than can/can't be fixed in post... when you press that shutter all the focus, Dof, aperture, composition etc... should be all done for you as you mentioned previously.... 

But in the end no photograph is reality... although some do a great job at coming close to it as possible... what you depict as a tone of color will differ from what my taste is... I might go a little lighter or darker... I might like the shot a bit over/under exposed and that's what I meant by personal taste... 

Not trying to disagree with you just trying to be more clear in what I meant...  please feel free to give me you're input if you don't agree...


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## smoke665 (May 6, 2017)

N1kon1k said:


> Perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly.... what I meant by my comment... was that I like to go out and spend the time outdoors and practice and achieve the shot on site... minimizing the errors than can/can't be fixed in post... when you press that shutter all the focus, Dof, aperture, composition etc... should be all done for you as you mentioned previously....
> 
> But in the end no photograph is reality... although some do a great job at coming close to it as possible... what you depict as a tone of color will differ from what my taste is... I might go a little lighter or darker... I might like the shot a bit over/under exposed and that's what I meant by personal taste...



I think I would have to agree we are both in agreement!!!!!


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## The_Traveler (May 6, 2017)

I am much less generous than the rest of you guys. I saw smoke665 as repeating that tired old ploy of attempting to define the way that he does things as the only way that *real photographers* do things and other ways as being too artsy-fartsy or lazy.

Thanks for setting him straight.


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## smoke665 (May 6, 2017)

The_Traveler said:


> I saw smoke665 as repeating that tired old ploy of attempting to define the way that he does things as the only way that *real photographers* do things and other ways as being too artsy-fartsy or lazy.



Then you would be wrong in your assumption, and might want to reread my posts. When you limit yourself to "only" one view, or one technique you stymie any future growth, something that applies to everything we do in life.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

@smoke665 yes, and categorically what i do at work is not cinematography either, even if i were the one taking the footage as well as doing all the post. There is a line here, and the fact that most people on set have literally no idea what I do is indicative that there is a line between post and production.

In film and television these rolls are much more defined, even color correction is a distinct specialty with people sitting in darkened booths all day turning knobs on consoles. Photography doesnt really enjoy this level of specialty, so the boundary is blurred. In photography getting as close to the finished result has merit, whereas getting as close to final grade in film production would make vfx and composite much more difficult (and costly).

Though there is also an argument to be made that exposure should be to capture as much information about the scene in order to maximize options in the darkroom (digital ir otherwise) since our perception of the scene cannot be recorded, we want as much tonal data to start with in order to sculpt it into how we experienced it.

Naturally, adding things that were not, on any level, peceived doesnt really fit this. Adding arbitrary filters and color for the sake of looking "neat" isnt really what id define as photography. That said, i dont neccesarily think its lazy or even negative. Unless the photographer is relying on it to overcome their shortcommings. Though, this is truly something that *never* works.


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## smoke665 (May 6, 2017)

@unpopular please don't think I'm doubting or not respecting your opinion. I've followed and read not only this but many of your other threads. Always found them enlightening and suspect that we probably agree on many things. If my comments implied that only lazy people use post editing, that wasn't my intent. I would be so scre..... without LR and PS. Nor did I mean ruffle any other feathers on their techniques, opinions and methods.


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

unpopular said:


> Adding arbitrary filters and color for the sake of looking "neat" isnt really what id define as photography. That said, i dont neccesarily think its lazy or even negative. Unless the photographer is relying on it to overcome their shortcommings. Though, this is truly something that *never* works.



I agree with you.  As a result of phone cameras, primarily, we're well down the path toward "filtered" photography, since virtually everyone who owns one considers themselves a photographer, and the filters are just so easy to apply.

It reminds me of when people discovered that you could get a really moody look by maladjusting HDR controls.  Many 'purists,' like myself, were initially horrified, as the "grunge" look found traction and took hold as a popular genre; but I'll admit to actually liking some images of that ilk, which came about as essentially 'playing with filters.'

I learned photography both in art school and on the job.  I was taught to "get it right in the camera," the classic approach.  That was sound advice, for unless you had the vision and resources of, say, Jerry Uelsmann, there were relatively few options available to significantly change an image.

However, with digital magic so close it hand, things have changed.  I've given presentations entitled "Visualization - the 'Aha!' Moment and Beyond" in which I speak about the differences between pre- and post-visualization.  Both have a legitimate place in photography.

Why not make each capture the best it can be, able to stand on its own without significant change?  I'm not talking about tweaking exposure, color, and the like, such as the 'normal' changes we'd apply in the wet darkroom; paper grade, filtration, burning, dodging, etc.  Some of these are even needed with RAW digital to recreate what it was that the photographer saw when he pressed the shutter button.  Raw captures often have no "soul."

But, we now have the ability to make virtually anything from a digital capture, which is what I refer to as post-visualization; using the original image as a basis for something else, which I often think of as "fodder for post-processing"; either through recomposition,  dramatically altering reality, or the creation of something else, entirely.

We can debate the validity of any of the tools we have at our disposal, but in the end, the only thing that truly matters is the image.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

I am not really sure I'd call Uelsmann's work "photography" though either. Sure, he used photography and yes, he was a photographer. But I have never been sure that I'd call an Uelsmann print "photography". This can't really be debated as something modern either. Uelsmann incorporated graphic art and visual effects practices of his day, just as what we are criticizing here do.

I recently saw an article on a "photographer" who took surreal images made using traditional matte painting techniques. Ok. Great. There was photography involved, but the images were about matte painting, not about the photographs that the mattes sat on. If you projected a photo onto a glass plate, does that really change anything than if you painted directly onto the plate? And for that matter, what if you used photoshop instead of traditional compositing techniques? 

It's almost like saying it'd be somehow different if you composited a photograph using Photoshop versus using Nuke or Fume - do the tools we use exclusively define what photography is? Why is Uelsmann a photographer, while someone who does a lot of compositing in Photoshop a graphic artist - especially when graphic artists while Uelsmann did the majority of their work used enlargers are cameras, too?


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

Murray Bloom said:


> Raw captures often have no "soul."



Truly, RAW capture isn't even an image.

I was trained in the dark room also, right at the moment that the world was transitioning to digital. The decline of film was mind-bogglingly fast, so the number of people who started learning photography strictly wet and ended up shooting photography strictly digital are pretty rare. Almost every photographer out there today either spent a lifetime shooting film and later switched to digital, or spent a lifetime shooting digital and has experimented with and perhaps embraced film. But I think this familiarity with one or the other brings about a false sense of difference between the two - and I think both groups often neglect the realization that before an image is processed it's not that different than an exposed sheet of film - everything about the image, every piece of usable information recorded by exposure is encoded into the file.

As with film, how this data is represented in the final image largely depends on how it is processed, but once it's processed anmd a JPEG, TIF or whatever is spat out, there is no way to recover what has been lost in the processing. Unlike film, RAW files are not destructive. We're not removing data from a raw file as we literally doing with film processing, If you get a TIF into photoshop and realize you needed those hilights after all, you can just reprocess it. With film, you say "Well crap. This should have been proceed shorter" - c'est la vie, pass the farmers and hope.

The "always process by inspection" nature of digital gives an impression that a RAW file is just like TIF, except that it is liek a super TIF that holds more information (in reality, this isn't true as most of the raw files we use are only 12, maybe 14 bit. A 16-bit TIF has plenty of headroom, and a 32-bit TIF is just excessive). RAW files aren't usable images until they're processed.

This is why I think of RAW files more like negatives. The idea is to cram as much data into that raw file as possible, to take advantage of the camera's entire capacity to record the light on it's sensor. This is what we were doing by "exposing for the shadows/process for the hilights". Digital is no different, except that we can immediately see the results - so we're kind of in this mentality that we should aim for an image that looks exactly how we want it to without any further adjustment, where a lot of funny business happens - just like with fim, except it is a numeric process rather than chemical.

If you open my RAW files in a raw processor with the standard "souless" settings, they'll look over exposed. Not just a little over exposed. But massively over-exposed. But for me,  provided I did everything right, I know that Zone IX is placed right on the outer left of the histogram and that I have ample, useable shadow detail to work with, it's just a matter of processing them into the zone I want, no different really than processing the hilights into their appropriate zone with film. (ETA: to be clear, I expose for the hilights and process for the shadows, which is the reverse of b/w film)

I don't see such a big difference here. The Raw file is like the unexposed film, the jpeg preview is like the polaroid proof, the processed TIF is like the negative and photoshop is like the enlarger.


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

I think I'd still lean toward considering Uelsmann a photographer.  His image components were photographs and his processes were photographic.  True, there was a strong design element in his work, but to simply consider him a graphic designer seems to do his genius a huge disservice.  My opinion, anyway.

It's interesting that you mention matte painting.  I studied with the late Jaromir Stephany, who was an acknowledged master of the Cliché Verre process.  Cliché Verre dates back to the earliest days of photography, and involves hand-created images on glass plates printed with light-sensitive materials.  In my case, I employed inks and paints on cleared graphic arts film, and printed the images on Cibachrome paper.  Here are a few samples:

  

Even though they were printed optically on light-sensitive material, I would never consider them to be photographs.  I think of them as paintings.  In fact, the wet part of the process is now history, and I scan the original films into the computer, to be processed in Photoshop.  So, I guess that makes me both a photographer and a painter, although the images themselves are entirely self-created with little input from me, the 'artist.'  Only the colorization is deliberate.  Actually, the 'art' is more about selecting potential images from the zillions of randomly created possibilities.  Just to complicate things further, how does that differ from a photo shoot or session where the photographer decides which images are worth capturing?  However, beyond that decision point, it's all photo/optical, so I guess whether or not they're photographs is really up to the viewer and occasional pedant.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

Uelsmann certainly felt he was a photographer and is adamant about it - honestly I'm not a huge fan of his, and felt that this insistence was really just an attempt to add legitimacy to his gimmick.

This is pretty fascinating in itself, of course, as in the time he was born photographers were just starting to legitimatize themselves as artists in the first place. To suggest that Uelsmann needed photography to legitimatize his work is kind of ironic.


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (so as not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal.  I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail).  What goes around . . .


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## Overread (May 6, 2017)

It's important to bring this into perspective and realise that photography is a medium not a method.


That is to say that its like paints or sketches or diagrams or anything else. 
It's a medium which can be used for a mind boggling number of variations for an even more mind boggling number of creative products. Some will be almost record level; others at the other extreme parts of a collage. 

So you can't really stand up and say that any one method is right or wrong or better or worse. Indeed most of these discussions boil down to "this is how I like to do it/wish to do it/how my inspirations do it". 

I think you can only start to come to methods or ways if you start to put down stipulations first. Eg for reporting style photos - then you can start to have some meaningful discussion on creative choice and appropriate methods. Otherwise its a horrible mishmash of veiwpoints from so many different approaches that it just ends up a mess of opinion with no real grounding.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

Murray Bloom said:


> Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal.  I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail).  What goes around . . .



Yes, I accidentally edited out that point. It is reverse. With digital zone system you expose for the hilights and process for the shadows.

The way I think of this is that by setting the exposure to just under the specular anything that clips out on the left side of the histogram could never be captured without clipping out the right side of the histogram, and because generally speaking the important stuff in a scene isn't in the deep shadow and because our eye is drawn to lighter parts of the scene and because there is no rolloff, we want to make sure we maintain integrity in everything brighter than whatever that minimum is.

And the rolloff issue is pretty big too. If there is no true specular I'll try to get all the hilights at zone IX or lower so I can add rolloff. In the majority of situations, this is how I work, I try to find the brightest region and place at the outer-most exposure.


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## bluewanders (May 6, 2017)

I think it is important to note that around the time photography became a "thing" the world of the painter started to shift dramatically.  Photographs were able to capture and record the visual world with greater accuracy and because of this many painters began exploring much more abstract avenues of self expression.  And there were plenty of people painters and non painters alike who didn't like the shift. 

The same can be said for film and digital photography I think. As we move further into the digital age and cgi  becomes more powerful.. A photographer of his/her times is going to be one who embraces the shift and explores the unreality of photography... We've had decades of exploring the reality.  

We know there are things that seem to be universally pleasant in an image... Artists have been building that store of classical knowledge for generations. Posing, lighting, shadows, gesture, ratios... On and on in an eon of iterative advancement.  The challenge, from the "of their times" perspective is not in replicating the past, but rather in crafting the future.  What universally pleasant things haven't we found yet?  What else works? What's the next step?

Rome is the mob... Fickle and bored.   What will you do the day you realize you are no longer culturally relevant? When the product you are creating is outdated and outmoded?  If you don't have your finger on the pulse of the society around you and you openly criticize where the society is taking the medium, how do you expect to continue selling to them? How do you expect to grow when you speak in definitives about a medium that isn't even fully born yet?

Sent from my VS990 using Tapatalk


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## greybeard (May 6, 2017)

Murray Bloom said:


> Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (so as not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal.  I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail).  What goes around . . .


Exactly the way we had to expose for transparencies.  Expose for highlights and hope the shadows held up.  With modern digital you can bring up the shadows in post processing but, if the highlights are blown out there is nothing you can do.


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## Derrel (May 6, 2017)

I find it interesting that so many people want to use focus stacking to "edit away" one of the biggest photographic signatures: the idea of an out of focus area in a photo; the idea that a camera and a lens can capture only "so much" within a depth of field band; there's this newly-created method, that of focus-stacking, and so many people are using it to transform the photographic process and the "signature" of lenses on subjects, into this computerized, idealized "uber-focused" type of imagery...using a methodology as if it were yet anohther Insta-Creative Tool, you know, like the 10-stop Neutral Density filter crowd loves to do....creativity via the Big Stopper...and loooooong exposures.

I find those who espouse a strong, vehement insistence on using the method of focus stacking to be reminiscent of the misguided, preachy,dogmatic A-hole-ism of Ansel Adamas and his ilk, as they ruined photography for several decades, and stifled creativity and innovation in photography by elevating a cannard to a so-called truth: that photos are supposed to be sharp, and clear, and to glorify everything shown in them.

The idea that "everythin must be in good focus, and SHARP!" was part of the Ggroup f/64 bullsh*+...the kind of idea that Ansel Adams tried to force onto an entiure generation of people. Do a day's woerth of research on Adams, and his hatred and personal, and professional attacks on Andrew Mortenson, and you will never, ever look at Ansel Adams as a positive influence again. The guy was a rogal azzhole, and a disgraceful man who doggedly tried to poison the reputation of one of the greatest Impressionist photographers the world hads ever known: all in the name of the Group f/64 idea that EVERYTHING needed to be as clear, and sharp, and as focused as possible.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

greybeard said:


> Murray Bloom said:
> 
> 
> > Interestingly, where I used to follow the common philosophy of exposing for the shadows and processing for the highlights (so as not to lose shadow detail), digital has caused a complete reversal.  I now expose for the highlights and process for the shadows (preserving highlight detail).  What goes around . . .
> ...



The point I'm advocating is to bring DOWN the shadows whenever possible. Pushing anything should always be avoided, except in some low contrast situations where you want to push the hilights up a bit to avoid a drastic pull on the shadows.

But the problem is how raw files are processed. There is PLENTY of latitude on the right if you can expose for it and compensate in processing.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

Derrel said:


> The idea that "everythin must be in good focus, and SHARP!" was part of the Ggroup f/64 bullsh*+...the kind of idea that Ansel Adams tried to force onto an entiure generation of people. Do a day's woerth of research on Adams, and his hatred and personal, and professional attacks on Andrew Mortenson, and you will never, ever look at Ansel Adams as a positive influence again. The guy was a rogal azzhole, and a disgraceful man who doggedly tried to poison the reputation of one of the greatest Impressionist photographers the world hads ever known: all in the name of the Group f/64 idea that EVERYTHING needed to be as clear, and sharp, and as focused as possible.



I hate adams as much as the next guy that hates adams, f/64 were a bunch of hypocritical, pretentious celebrity photographers whose approach was contrived, stuffy and pretty much represents everything i dislike about Modernism as a whole.

But I don't think you can really say that Adams wasn't a positive influence, at least not on the technical front.


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## Derrel (May 6, 2017)

Expose to the Right (ETTR) made sense back in 2001-2008....but now with much better sensor technology, better signal proicessing in-camera, better in-camera electronics, and better software, ETTR seems really quaint to me!

Anybody who has shot a Sony EXMOR sensor camera knows that it is NO LONGER necessary to expose the crap out of digital shadows: we can now EASILYa do 4,and even 5-stop UNDER-exposures, and "lift" the shadows in softeware, and make great images. ETTR would make such a common methodoligy into a heretical-level crime! ERxpose to The Right is basically, dead for Sony,Pentax,Nikon,and Hasselblad camera users, and a few others. Meanwhile...the Kwannon set continues ETTR'ing....


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

ETTR always makes *sense* - more exposure will always result in greater signal. Whether it's worth doing is another question.

I'll admit, I hardly ever do it with my x-trans and EVFs discourage it in practice.


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## unpopular (May 6, 2017)

(though, some of this too is that the X-E1's meter only reads out +2EV, which makes it kind of awkward to properly meter for the hilights)


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## Derrel (May 6, 2017)

Adams was a technician of high order, but his insistence on rendering things sharply, and clearly, and his influence were overall a huige Net Minus for creativity, expression, and experimentation, and he set photography as a creative, artistic medium back decades.

The idea that photography is only good for clear,sharp, idealized images of nature is a facile concept, and Ansel Adams was a master of that idea. His influence set photography as an artistic form back decades. His paitn-by-numbers and pretty scenes of American Grandeur were a throwback to earlier landscapers. Getting fixated on Yosemite was a good example of tunnel vision, as was the Group f/64 association. I judge him by the company he kept, and by his personal, decades-lng vendetta against impressionist photography.

If his photo fixation and narrow-mindedness had been directed at, say groups of people, he would have made a classic anti-Semite, or classic pro-Marxist radical. The guy had **** for brains in terms of what he thought was "worthwhile" to do with a camera. That's why his work had so little growth over decades. Same old sh*+_,over and over, and over. He despised the work of anybody who thought differently than he did. He was, ultimately, a narrow-minded old coot who did the same schtick for his entire career. But, yeah...a great darkroom printer, and a great technician. Sure. But his dogmatic attirtude was, as I said, a net negative for the field of photography. I am glad thatso many younmger people have no idea what kind of crap he espoused.


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

Derrel, I completely agree with what you wrote about Adams.  However, you have to consider that he brought an entirely new level of appreciation to photography among the populace in general.

By striving for universal sharpness at times (and not at others), I feel that I'm giving the viewer more opportunity to explore an image.  I can't count the number of times that I've viewed a photograph only to discover that an interesting area was outside of the chosen depth of field.  I suppose that this is a result of the photographer's choices, but it can be frustrating, nonetheless.


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## Derrel (May 6, 2017)

It's GREAT to see you back, Murray Bloom! Long time, no see!


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## Murray Bloom (May 6, 2017)

Thanks, Derrel!  I have to stop by from time to time to preach my gospel of image quality.  LOL 

. . . even when nobody wants it.


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## Overread (May 7, 2017)

I'd bet money if instead of landscapes we were talking about macro and the use of focus stacking this thread would have been 2 maybe 3 pages at most and we'd not have had the huge meta-debate on the creative aspects of photography.

To my eye its an interesting display of dogma thinking whereby certain methods are valid within certain situations and bringing those methods into other areas meets resistance.

Photography can give selective focus - it can give hyper focal depth of field - it can today give practical focus stacking for the average person (you could do it in the past too - but it would take freakishly long and require a lot of work). No one of those methods is better or worse; no one is editing away a strength or doing something wrong or anything like that. It's just different approaches.

Just the very same way that one can use very thin depths of field deliberately with macro instead of the small apertures and deeper depth of field. We should always embrace thinking that is not standard but capable of producing valid results.


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## thereyougo! (May 7, 2017)

bluewanders said:


> I think it is important to note that around the time photography became a "thing" the world of the painter started to shift dramatically.  Photographs were able to capture and record the visual world with greater accuracy and because of this many painters began exploring much more abstract avenues of self expression.  And there were plenty of people painters and non painters alike who didn't like the shift.
> 
> The same can be said for film and digital photography I think. As we move further into the digital age and cgi  becomes more powerful.. A photographer of his/her times is going to be one who embraces the shift and explores the unreality of photography... We've had decades of exploring the reality.
> 
> ...



I admire you for typing that on a mobile device, mine would have been full of auto(in)corrects. 

However, I disagree with you.  Who decides who is 'culturally relevant'.  And should those that are 'culturally irrelevant' care a fig about it?  Art shouldn't be defined by technology, and it is kind of sad that technology is too often seen as being more important.  We've seen what technology has done to music - how many people think that people sing the way they do on 'Glee' and High School Musical? That for me is the musical equivalent of HDR and hyper sharp images.  They grate.  They are like fingernails down a black board.  Not only that, there is no smooth gradation.  Overuse of autotune in music and the overuse of computer tools in photography rids us of the smooth gradation. 

Selective focus is a compositional tool, and making things hyper sharp so the whole scene is hyper sharp won't make the scene look more real or '3D'.  A 2D image is just that.  We can use shadows and softer focus to make an image more pleasing, and in many ways have more shape. 

In art we have the ability to interpret an image and by using compositional tools (including not all of the image being tack sharp), we can guide our viewers to our interpretation.  We should be guiding them through, not scratching their eyes out with oversharp images that don't look realistic.  Think of bad HDR/tonemapping and that's where we will end up with sharpening...


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## bluewanders (May 8, 2017)

thereyougo! said:


> bluewanders said:
> 
> 
> > I think it is important to note that around the time photography became a "thing" the world of the painter started to shift dramatically.  Photographs were able to capture and record the visual world with greater accuracy and because of this many painters began exploring much more abstract avenues of self expression.  And there were plenty of people painters and non painters alike who didn't like the shift.
> ...


Hi!  Sorry for the long silence, it's been a busy weekend. Writing on the phone isn't too bad.  Using Swype I can actually type fairly quickly and accurately which is a godsend since I'm on the move so much... Getting out a laptop can often be entirely too confining so I don't get much computer time until the end of the day usually.

Thanks for the reply!  I think I understand your view point... And I can  agree with some of what you said.

I'd say there is no-one who decides anyone is no longer culturally relevant... It's probably more accurate to say a decision is never made at all, rather a person finds society just continues marching on long after they themselves have been walking a completely different direction or stopped walking altogether.  Most people probably reach a point where they lose synchronicity with the world around them.  It's not a bad thing necessarily... Unless you've got something to sell.

A good example of this is film itself... It just really isn't culturally relevant anymore. Historically it is and always will be relevant... But it gets harder to find every year... Camera stores are closing down... Places to get it developed are disappearing... It's becoming a phantom item you have to buy from virtual store fronts online because increasingly the only way to make profit from dealing with it is to have a super low overhead and be able to serve a dwindling global consumer pool. 

The problem I find with your argument is that it is exclusionary and doesn't allow for the type of progress that society makes. 

It is exclusionary because it allows for selective focus to be a compositional tool but does not allow for the idea of non-selective focus to be a compositional tool. 

Why is that?  Isn't composition nothing more than a series of decision points intended to create an aesthetic? Are we talking about a Michelangelo aesthetic or a Picasso aesthetic?  In my mind even though they were both painters the decisions they made when creating their work had wildly divergent paths... Which I would argue was a direct result of the times they lived in and what had come before them.  For that matter, art is a conversation that has been going on since the canvas was cave walls.  Technology doesn't drive man... Mans culture drives technology.  Mans culture drives everything, including art... And art is such a broad spectrum. 

Cuisine is an art... And we eat very differently than we used to.  Not because it was decided that people who wanted to cook and eat their food off sticks were bad and wrong... But because the number of people who preferred to take all their meals that way dwindled off into extinction.

So... No the culturally irrelevant don't have to give a fig at all... They have every right to eat their food any way they would like and I fully support them in that endeavor... I like my food cooked over a fire sometimes myself. But if they want to make a living cooking and selling food to everyone else it might not be a really good idea to only serve food the one truely aesthetic way that exists... Burnt over a fire on a twig. 

While we are on the subject of music... What's up with that punk rock?  Most of those guys didn't even know how to play their instruments "right"... They just sort of banged away at them while yelling at a mic.  But Holy Cow did punk have a big impact on the world... Rippling right into a future we haven't imagined yet.  And then there's that devil music... The rock and roll... Truly the downfall of music as an art form, some people cried. One could argue it's little better than shrieking cats in comparison to the divinely inspired succor of Gregorian Chant. 

I honestly can't even imagine what it would be like to try making a decent living today as a Gregorian Chanter.  Monasteries certainly aren't in every town... I'd wager there's fewer now than in the past. Beautiful beautiful music though... It's a real shame it's so hard to find. You can find some cds of Gregorian chant on Amazon though.  That's some pretty low overhead.

There's a pretty strong argument that can be made concerning the modern aesthetic.  The way people consume media has changed and so has the way they interact with the world.  People have been watching television and playing video games for decades... Both of those are extremely common mediums in modern America which feature extremely augmented realities and methods of visually communicating in those augmented realities.  I think that's actually a really interesting thought to explore but I've already written a short book.

I should take a moment to note my response was actually directed at all the hate being lobbed at the use of filters and other processing techniques.  Though I'd say focus stacking certainly fits into that category.

Sent from my VS990 using Tapatalk


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## The_Traveler (May 9, 2017)

After these 6 pages, I understand how a sparrow must feel hopping around on huge piles of crap after a circus parade goes by, wondering if there is anything palatable to be found in the middle.


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## Karls (May 16, 2017)

From reading and watching so many things on photography I can firmly say that photography in the end has to be taken with a grain of salt... I feel like some principles need to be exercised For a photo to work but in the end how you post process it's up to a personal taste... in the end I feel like if you can sell your work and make a good living equals success


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## The_Traveler (May 16, 2017)

Karls said:


> in the end I feel like if you can sell your work and make a good living equals success



Economic reward is not a marker of success for everyone. 
There are many reasons why people buy images, I can't imagine that 'quality' is high on that list.


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## qmr55 (May 16, 2017)

Commenting just to be notified of new comments, very interesting thread! Can't wait to read the rest of it tonight after work.


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## table1349 (May 16, 2017)




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