Photoshop vs Untouched

02005-08-06 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Regarding the issue of photoshop vs untouched photos I am reminded of a story I believe Ram Dass told years ago. He saw his guru in India and showed him tabs of LSD. The guru grabbed the tabs and swallowed all of them. Ram Dass, knew that this was a very high dose, but after a while the guru just said to him something like: same life, different illusion.

In other words a photo is an image, whether it comes straight from the camera or via photoshopping… a digital camera uses internal software to make the picture look nice, which becomes obvious when you use different cameras. Each brand uses a different algorithm to manipulate reality. Some like to warm up the image a little bit, others tend more towards the blue spectrum. This was even true for the old film. Kodakchromes always looked quite different from Agfachromes and I used to use each for a different effect.

Therefore to me it really does not matter how a person creates an image. A photo is the result of a person’s vision/imagination/creativity. I have no time for claims of purity, because to me they are false. A photo is a photo is a photo.

Hey, I have an idea. Somebody could start the Society for Photographic Fundamentalists (PhoFun maybe? although http://phofun.org is already taken apparently…) and once everyone has agreed on what constitutes an un-manipulated Fundamentalist Photograph – I suggest a fixed lens as a good starting point and imagine the discussion about the allowed ISO sensitivity settings could get quite lively – the software details could be agreed upon. At that time the PhoFun Society could attempt to get all manufacturers of photographic equipment to add a setting on their cameras that would disable many of the functions and lock the equipment to very specific PhoFun settings which would of course be identical on every camera… Of course the glass compound and the coating used for each manufacturer’s lenses differs from brand to brand – but we have to start (stop?) somewhere… Enjoy!

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