It’s all an illusion

I occasionally get worked up with the discussion of photo manipulation and photo purity. What I mean is there are factions of photographers who believe any but the most basic of photo editing renders a photograph something other than a photograph, it isn’t “true to life”. I argue none of it is actually “true to life”. The photograph I have included here is lit naturally, by the sun under the cover of a roof at an open-air farmer’s market. No light modifiers, not supplemental light sources, no post-processing beyond a slight crop. When we take a photograph we make choices that modify the reality of the scene.

First, we are recording a moment, or in some instances a few moments of time as a still image. Next, we make a choice on how to meter the light, spot metering, matrix metering, center-weighted, and where we are metering. We decide what aperture to use, to make sure how much of an image is “in focus”. We decided how close to get with the lens’ focal length. As you see by using our cameras to record a scene, we are already modifying “true to life”.

Photography is all illusion. We take a three-dimensional world and convert it to a still image represented in a two-dimensional fashion. So to me, it irrelevant whether or not an image has been post-processed, unless the photographer is a photojournalistic image. Even a documentary image is merely a representation of what happened based on the photographer’s position to the event or scene affected by the choices mentioned above. It is all an illusion so let photographers do their thing and create their images. Remember, we can please everyone so it is most important to please ourselves with our work.