An Anti-Photoshopping Rant

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an opinion piece that has become something you can expect periodically: a rant against "Photoshopping."

I get tired of the sentimental and wistful attitudes people have toward what they think is photographic purity. Certain, the drive for visual perfection gets a bit silly, but why blame Photoshop? In the past, people used airbrushing, scraping, paintbrushes, dyes, and pencils to "fix" images.

Do I heavily use Photoshop in my work? Absolutely - because if I'm doing something digitally, that is the way I crop, balance color, adjust contrast levels, spot dust motes, create unsharp masks, and a number of other niggling issues that were formerly considered responsible darkroom work. Do you really want that photo to look literally off-color, badly composed, and speckled?

When people "rework ... every shot," is this total transformation, or the normal twiddling that an art department or photographer must do? Are critics so lacking in technical understanding that they have no idea just how limited and misleading camera technology is? Guess what, folks: no photograph is actually what the photographer saw. Why not eliminate the distortions of lenses and limited color palates of both digital capture chips and film? Why not upbraid writers for even worse transgressions: bending quotes, hyping tension, enhancing drama, and otherwise recreating what they actually saw? What bigger fantasy-making machinery is there?

Hacking a Canon Point-and-Shoot

I wouldn't see myself doing this, but have to admire the determination and ingenuity of the people responsible. Lifehacker.com has an article on how to load low-level software (a firmware enhancement, if you know the term) into a Canon point-and-shoot, often achieving many of the following:

• added information on the display screen


• RAW image support, and not just JPEG


• exposure times of over a minute and shutter speeds over 1/25,000 sec


• automatic exposure bracketing

I am surprised and impressed by the claims - though I'm not quite ready to test them on one of the point-and-shoots members of my family own.

Winning Photography Contests

I indirectly came across this blog entry from an ex-stock photographer who writes the blog Photocritic.org and who found himself as a judge on a photography contest. How to win photography competitions offers a set of suggestions for how to tell a story and make your entry stand out from competition in the process. It's a bit long, thoughtful, and worth the read if you're thinking of submitting images.