This is an image from yesterday afternoon, taken shortly before 5pm. No sun, bright colors nevertheless.
Regarding our discussion about composite photographs, Techfan wrote an interesting comment to the last post:
Photography is a creative medium but because of its technical possibilities it can also be a vehicle for some version of the truth. It is and has always been the responsibility of the photographer to tread that line between creativity and what passes for truth.
This “can also be a vehicle for some version of the truth” may be one reason why people so often get passionate about “manipulated photography”, Basically it is also the tenor of Paul Maxim’s reply:
Manipulation is OK when the manipulator does it openly. And I might say, I have no problem with that at all. Normally I disclose such things whenever I feel they are essential. Thus I may remove some dirt on the ground without notice, but I won’t change major elements of the image.
For the image in question, the one in “1138 – The Man That Got Away”, I have not properly disclosed it, instead I have hinted at it in form of a question. I was interested in the general question of how these things are received.
It’s exactly as I wrote: I have made a series of images, none of them was good enough, either the left or the right background was obstructed, and I have combined the image from two exposures. Thus this is not equivalent to the “sunset that has never happened”, all parts of this image “happened” within about 30 seconds, but still, I would not have been able to make the image in one exposure. It is fiction in a very restricted kind of way.
One of the reasons why I asked, was that I did not feel entirely comfortable with it. It was fairly clear to me that I had to disclose it, but as I said, there are things that I clone out in many images, and I really wanted to find out to what extent disclosure is expected by my visitors.
Just to give you another example for reference, there is one image, “542 – The Show Is Over, Say Good-Bye”, one of my Photoshop tutorials, where I have taken the image of an empty stair and added a person. I had taken the image of the person just a minute before (or after, I can’t remember), and I had taken the image from a slightly different perspective with a different focal length. To make the person match, I had to apply some perspective distortions. Of course I had disclosed it, yes, I had even explained the process in detail, making it a tutorial. And I’m pretty proud of the image, I might say 🙂
In any case, that is about as far as I might go. I don’t replace skies. It’s not that I condemn it, it just that it does not interest me enough to make it worth the effort, and, besides, I just can’t do it as well as my friend Ted Byrne 🙂
I plan to add another static page to the menu, a page where I explain what I do regularly, why I do it, and what you can expect of my images when I don’t explicitly describe the process. Basically I’ll re-use some content of this post and make it easily accessible. This could as well go into the “About” page, but I feel it is important enough to warrant a page of its own. Does anybody have an idea for a short title, preferably a single word? I have thought of “Process” or maybe simply “Disclosure”, but I am not sure if that properly communicates the intention.
The Song of the Day is “Something In The Night” from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town”. Hear it on YouTube.