Is technique so important? I’m starting to doubt my ability to see an image before I take it. Instead, I see aperture, focal length, ISO settings. It began when someone complimented one of my images as “technically perfect” and then added that there was no soul. I think she was wrong about the first and right about the second.

We have cameras that can make all our decisions for us or help us with some of them to consider the important things: lighting, composition. Post-processing software can – and does – take care of the rest. Instead, I see arguments raging in technical sites about tone curves and Nyquist frequency charts. Is photography at this level a techno-geek refuge for the non-artists? (This question serves to provoke a reasoned reply, not a tirade, and certainly does not reflect my views, only my doubts.)

Technical arguments made sense when photographers had to do everything manually with light meters and darkrooms and are still important when buying a camera, but I fail to see the importance of, for example, Exif data. Why not just ask the photographer?

Camera manufacturers and photo magazines only fire this technical craving, if only because they want you to think that a better (read: “more expensive”) camera takes better photographs.

Remember: all the iconic photographs of the past century were taken by gifted/lucky practitioners whose equipment didn't offer a fraction of the features now found in a modern compact.

What do you think? Are you an artist? Or “just” a photographer? Are the two mutually exclusive? Is your camera as “unimportant” as the brush, knife or palette to the painter? Or does the camera really determine your way of shooting. I know the answer lies somewhere in between these extremes, but I’d appreciate your input.

I think I am in agreement with you, and I firmly believe that it all starts with the thought and the eye, the camera is the wheel as is the pc or the darkroom. I don't think we should pit the technology, technique and instinct against one and other, more that we should see how best to use them together. like you say some of the most powerful and memorable shots of all time have been taken under the most difficult circumstances, in the blink of an eye, without any planning and with only the tools that were to hand at the time, and clearly these shots are not judged on their technical merit but the drama, passion, horror that they project, whereas to shoot a landscape or a formal portrait for example, takes planning in terms of equipment and settings etc and will indeed be judged on technical merit as well the shot itself.

So i think its becoming more and more difficult, with the speed in which photographic technology is moving, to grasp the boundaries, if indeeed there are any, it seems to me that photography is an ever growing umberella where we can pick out the parts that are relevant to us, that parts that appeal to us for our own reasons as both photographer and critics.

I am only an amatuer photographer, and these are just my thoughts, they certainly don't carry and real weight and of course I may be completley wrong or missing the point altogether.

As you know I am a fan of exif data, being a reletive beginer I have found it invaluable when looking at other photographers work, not all I admit, but focal length especially has allways interested me as does aperture vs shutterspeed, It would be nice to ask the photographer but not very practicle especially when viewing a number of blogs, although I do allways try to leave a comment.

I didn't have a clue what a nyquist freq chart was...so I googled it and guess what??? I still don't.

Am I an artist or a photographer? can I be a bit of both? My camera is important to me in as much as it feels good in my hands, it has a nice weight its comfy and seems to fit me...i value this more than its technical ability but in a pinch...any port in a storm..except perhaps my bloodty camera phone since it annoys the hell out of me!

I hope I have answered some of your questions, probably not! I admit I tend to waffle!

Subjective !

good question
and it all depends on why you are taking photos.
Personally I dont think the artist and photographer needs to be exclusive.
or for that matter should be.

A good camera and mastery of it (and of PP) will allow an artist to produce images as close as possible to the vision they had when taking their shot but they can obviously take produce stunning pictures even if the equipment restricts them to the realm of what is possible instead of providing unlimited freedom. A twerp with an expensive camera will only create interesting images by chance.
Then there is the third category, the twerp with the iffy equipment like myself who just snaps on instinct with no clear idea of what they're doing and are constantly surprised over how it turned out and has a lot of fun trying to save what can be saved with PP.

Very interesting read....

Rather than seeing this as a "conflict" between technology, technique, instinct, camera, post processing etc, I believe this to be more of an effort to make better and better pictures.
Most of us start with a basic digicam, clicking everything one finds in the way. Although my 1st camera to use was a film SLR @ 10 y, i never did any real clicking till i got my own P &
s @ 17yrs.

All i had was little bit of instinct, a camera and the rest of the world. The journey went on, my interest into photography grew and so did the frustration with the camera.

"Oh I am not getting that good a picture"
"So much noise, even in basic evening shots"
"SO much blur"
"I wish the image quality of better"

Anyway i survived the temptation of a bridge camera, and bought a DSLR last year. And has the curve been steep?

I should say that the percentage of people using DSLR's in India is very low, and on my purchase, i got to hear the most - "Why will u go manual on such a costly camera, when u can get auto"

My answer, cos it lets me, giving me much more control and letting my neanderthal brain some excitement.

Soon i realized I am getting good quality pictures but not "good quality". I used levels, curves, color correction, layers and what nots, trying to learn to use photoshop in and out!

Then i discovered raw and things became a lot simpler.

Post processing - Anything that is done to the picture once i have opened the shutter, so if it is done in camera or on my top end quad core high ram over clocked desktop, what difference does it make?
For purists it does, and surprisingly so does for me.
I get to choose what happens where, with finer control and not wasting much time on field

It needs sharpening do it.
It needs contrast, do it.
It does not need colour boosting , so no need to saturate it.

So from a 4megapixel <1MB file i have come to a 15megapixel, 14bit raw file all in search for a better picture.
Did the photographer in me become better, I think so.
Did the camera help, it did.
Would i buy better (read costlier) equipment? Ofcourse, if I had the money.
Will I stop shooting till i get "better" equipment? No, cos what i have is better than so many others.

AM i an artist or a photographer? I am a photographer ofcourse... maybe sometimes an artist too. Mostly a photographer!


As for the question of seeing the exif data, why not? Ofcourse u can ask, but if u gonna tell that anyway, why not show that in 1st place.
And if u gonna ask the photographer, rather than asking "WHAt is the exif data?" I think better to ask is "How did u shoot this?". I believe that would sound more like a photographer rather than a tech.

regards,
Soubhagya

PS: I hope i have been coherent enough. A long afternoon nap and the coffee hasnt kicked in yet.

Congratulations Stéfan, its an interesting debate you’ve kicked off here.

For me the idea is primary and the technology comes second. But we need a certain level of technology to make the idea happen. Sometimes you can get a great picture with poor equipment, but other times a great idea can be marred by poor equipment.

Although there’s now tons of stuff that you can do to enhance a photo, there are certain things that it really does pay to get right up front. Lighting and DOF seem to me to be two things where no amount of tinkering afterwards can compensate for getting it right in the first place.

I tend to think of photographic quality as being on a bell-curve (if the truth be known, in my simplistic world I think of most things as on a bell curve). There will be a few excellent pictures, a few completely hopeless ones, and the majority somewhere in the middle. It seems to me that the purpose of technology is to try and push the curve a bit to the right of our chart so that most pictures become better. But here’s the rub, such improvements do not occur evenly. If your pictures are already at the top end, there may be little that can be done to improve them. If they are completely shit, then there’s probably little that can be done to salvage them and the most useful technology is the dustbin. But if they are in the middle there’s probably a fair bit than can be done to rack them up a notch or two.

I read (well, I say read it was a picture book really) a fascinating book a month or so ago: The Art of Seeing: The Best of "Reuters" Photography (perhaps there's a clue in the title). It was crammed full of brilliant photos. Not one of them had any post processing done to them – by the company’s rules their pictures are all sold exactly as they came out of the camera. Some of them were just sheer vision that left me thinking, I wish I could see things like that. Others were pure tenacity (for example, one guy who took pictures of the Pamplona bull run every year and then by chance one year got a shot of someone falling right in front of his camera). Some were all technical; the best example being a Naval photographer who got the shot of a sonic boom as a plane went through the sound barrier. I guess what I learned from this is that it takes all sorts. What was really interesting was the variety of images and styles that can be produced by one person and one box.

So am I a photographer or an artist? Well, a bit of both depending on what I feel like at the time. But mostly, I just like playing.

Post script. In between starting and finishing this ramble (sorry), I watched a bit of tv. What I watched was the sublime Professor Brian Cox on BBC HD. Now, I don’t know if they ever get the Cox out in Provence, or anywhere else for that matter, but if they do I highly recommend a good hard look. What struck me was the way the BBC HD treats this new tool compared to how Murdoch’s Sky treats it. For Sky, it is all about the technology. How can they get the clearest image, the nearest close up, the all telling freeze frame. For the BBC, in contrast, it is about producing something that is visually compelling. It is so apparent that their efforts are put into originality, composition, juxtaposition and human interest. Both companies produce images worth watching, but only one of them could be called art. And it is that one whose programmes look so much better. I realise it’s a bit of a sidewise view, but for me the HD issue in tv runs parallel to the technology issue in (amateur) photography.

I think a good "photographer" should know how to use their camera on any setting so that when they do have that natural or learned talent to spot things, they know how to take the picture they see in their minds. That being said, I am a split household. My husband is fully digitally trained and the other day he made a comment that a picture of his was 100 perfect white balance, but to the eye it looked off. I care more about the final products feel and if it's striking or not. I think you can get to carried away in technicalities, but that's where the balancing act comes in. I agree with the statement it also matters why you are taking the picture.
As a professional (if you are calling yourself one), I think you should know how to take a good picture on a manual setting. Technology fails and when it does, it's up to you to use your knowledge.
As for camera, I think nice camera's help, but don't make a photographer. As you cited, celebrated photographer's of the past had to rely on their eye and less progressive cameras. I have posted my camera and lens (sometimes other info) because I have been asked in the past. I also think know your info is a good way to learn so you could reduplicate a shot if you were ever in the same scenario again. Especially in the scenarios where you just got lucky with a great shot.

As for being called an artist, I think an artist is someone who can move me emotionally from a perspective that isn't like everyone else. Or someone who can give me a different view of a world that I might see everyday. I am a photographer and I like to think at times I can be an artist.

Good topic

I have read with much interest the comments in this thread and I’m grateful to those of you who have given time and thought to the subject. I’m not sure whether I have any answers, however!

Let me explain. One of the landmark copyright law cases in France dates back to the 1840s when an artist sued a photographer for capturing his painting and then selling the “prints” as his work. The artist claimed photographer was merely duplicating the painting and passing it off as his own work. The court ruled that the Daguerreotype was a work of art in its own right, but I suspect that photography has never shaken off its schizophrenia; it serves merely to reproduce nature and is slavishly beholden to this imperative. “The camera never lies”, right?

This is the argument that a photograph is a document, a testimonial to reality.

The ubiquity of today’s photojournalism underscores the “testimonial” requirement to show things as they are, but it is undermined by the power of image editing software. The verb “photoshop” has only replaced words such as “doctor” or “retouch”, which implies we deviate from the visual truth every time we edit what our cameras capture. Again, in France, there was a recently a minor scandal about a cover page on a glamour magazine portraying the then justice minister in which we later found out that a very expensive diamond ring had been digitally removed. The publisher claimed it was because the shiny object was distracting. Everyone else believes it was because the picture belied Ms Dati’s image as a ‘normal’ person and the magazine’s owners are very close to the government. At my more modest level, I systematically lengthen people (so that they digitally lose weight), whiten teeth and brighten eyes. Whatever the reason, the truth is we now have good reason to doubt “the camera never lies” statement.

So what about out our right to express our artistic feelings? Here, photographs are no longer documents, but works, expressions, ideas given visual form with the initially recorded image serving merely as the basis for something else.

And because Photoshop et al. makes it easy to enhance images, people like me who can’t draw and have no formal artistic training can produce something that pleases us and, more importantly, pleases others.

But are we being seduced by the dark side of the Photoshop force? We were more careful when we shot in film and now we can just correct afterwards, if not during. Aren’t we losing our respect for composition and lighting? Instead, we’re fascinated by Exif data. I no longer have to worry (OK, I never did before anyway) about ISO or even aperture, but I am paying undue attention to colour space, lens corner sharpness, converging parallels and, God forbid, whether my shot merits HDR treatment.

The desire to improve on nature is part and parcel of the photographer’s approach; Doisneau’s Le Baiser and Dorothea Lange’s woman and children in the Depression were both contrived, but the will and the way were purely in the photographer’s eye, not a Custom Function sub-menu or Adjustment layer.

Something tells me my photography would be better without a computer, but my photographs wouldn’t.

I think good photography begins with understanding your camera equipment. I've never known a camera that was incapable of taking a good photo, but I've known lots of folks that believe a better (more expensive, more versatile) camera will produce better photographs. From there you can move to other issues of light, balance, and composition, but first and foremost, you have to understand the capabilities (and limitations) of the particular camera you're using.
I am a practicing amateur, still learning, and an old film guy who read Ansel Adams' "The Negative," but never got all of the shades of gray right.
The use of technology and post processing poses an interesting question. Some would say, "If it didn't come out of the camera, it's not really a photograph, it's something that was created."
I'm not an advocate of using post processing to create images that your eye didn't see, but on the other hand, sometimes my eye sees images my camera can't capture - and therein comes the "artful eye" of a photographer. If post processing can enhance the image to be more like the photographer SAW it, then the real "capture" is more than the camera shot, but represents more accurately what the eye of the photographer envisioned.
There's no right or wrong answer - only different points of view and opinion. This has been an interesting discussion.

"Aren’t we losing our respect for composition and lighting?" I do not think so Stefan. I am still photographing both analog and digital and I can say I care for composition and lighting. Nevertheless if I hold the prints in my hand I ask myself "Why couldn´t I see the result before. From my point of view this is simply a matter of attitude towards photography. There were snap shooters all the time the difference is today it is easier to produce by incident a photo and not only a snap shot.

Wow! The thread here is amazing!

I agree that the camera is just the tool, much like an artist's brush & canvas. Even the most simple P&S camera can produce amazing results when the photographer translates what he "sees" into a certain composition, using the light and mood as compliments to the final product.

Another example is the equipment that sports players use - buying a better set of golf clubs or a "better" tennis racket will not necessarily make you a better player. You still need the proper technique and skills to produce the desired outcome.

My main goal for joining PB was to really get to know my cameras controls & capabilities. I realize this is an life-long, on-going journey, and I'm enjoying the ride! I use PSE as a learning tool - correcting as I go along, and learn from my mistakes. I think the overall goal of a photographer would be to capture exactly what they "see", and PS (and other PP programs) helps to correct that imbalance.

Behind the camera, I am an artist in composition, manipulation of light, and story-teller of sorts. The editing is an extension because I do care about what other people "see" through my eyes, my pictures................ : )

GREAT discussion, Stefan!

I tend to think of myself as an artist first. I see the shot before I take it. If I don't see it, I don't take it because I know it won't be what I want. I shoot with a Sony Alpha 100, 18-70 zoom, 70-300 zoom, and a Sony 50mm Macro. I have yet to find a situation where I've taken a shot and missing it was the camera or lens fault. Most times requesting the camera or lenses to go beyond what they were designed for and I knew it. I don't believe that technology or technique can compensate for what we have between our ears. You can have all the technology and perfect technique and if you don't have the creativity or drive to put it to use it's useless. Am I any good, I've been told so by some really good amatures and pros alike. Photography is just like sex, it's mostly in the head. Think before you shoot. It saves wear and tear on the camera, and a lot of editing time. Yes! Learn your camera, the feel, the technology and how to use it till it becomes instinct not a series of steps. When you spend some and sometimes a lot of time on that then you're free to engage the creative side of the mind. You'll find that after the basic learning period, you'll shoot fewer photos, better photos, and have a lot more fun. Would I like to sell some of my work, sure, but it's really to get out there and create. Enoy!

@ pdsdville:
"Photography is just like sex"? Oh god, I really, really, really hope it isn't...

But thanks for this very interesting input.