The person who shared this OK Go“This Too Shall Pass” music video with me wrote simply, “Someone learned his physics well.” As I watched the video — utterly entranced, wondering where I could get my hands on a few thousand dominoes — I had to agree.
Understanding physics certainly would be important for getting all these gadgets to go off just right, so perfectly. Clearly, this is for real, I was thinking. This is really happening in front of me. This is not a product of postproduction wizardry.
Maybe I was wrong about that, I realized. But then, it really didn’t matter.
The mechanical wonders in this video feel and so they are real. I believe in the magic of a magician who performs wonderfully, even though I know he is just performing a “trick.” The real trick, which is the magic, is that I feel and believe what I am seeing, regardless of what I might be thinking.
“My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today,” photographer Peter Lindbergh recently reported to “The New York Times” in regard to digital retouching. He added, “Heartless retouching should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.”
With this sentiment, Lindbergh brings the “too much or too little” arguments about retouching to an important level of social concern relating to one’s sense of identity. This is a lot more interesting than Continue reading “On Heartless Retouching”
Regardless of political orientation, everyone seemed to be pretty perturbed last week when the White House shelled out $300,000-plus to fly Air Force One over New York City to take a publicity shot, not only spending money needlessly but also scaring the pants off the locals.
“We all look at photoshopdisasters.com,” New York-based still life photographer Nicholas Eveleigh told me during a recent interview. He was referring over reliance on postproduction to try to correct the uncorrectable. “One can make some REALLY nice images without Photoshop,” said Eveleigh, who tries to get it right in-camera.
I said, “Yes” when Eveleigh mentioned Photoshop Disasters, as if EVERYONE knows about it. And according to the site, 30,000 photographers head there each day, indicating that, um, just about everyone on the planet is in the know. But, um, I wasn’t. Continue reading “Photoshop Disasters is Fun and Educational”
A couple weeks ago I saw the traveling World Press Photo ’08 exhibit on display here in Buenos Aires. A fan of the yearly photojournalism contest, I was quite surprised by my reaction to the experience. It was the first time I had seen World Press Photo in person, and I was stunned by the photojournalists’ incredibly diverse and extreme postproduction practices.
Journalistic photography has never been as so-called “objective” as the general public tends to think. From selective cropping to the so-called “hand of god” burning and dogging techniques used by traditional black and white newspaper shooters, photographers have been employing postproduction techniques to better tell their stories since long before the advent of digital. As photographers, we are well aware of this.
