Pure Photography is not about Photoshopping Details

Here is another reason why you should be reverting back to analog photography instead of going digital. The image above is the latest in a series of digital photo editing tools which basically allows you change any landscape picture into one that could just win you an award.

The program in question is called Landscape Pro, an intelligent picture detecting and enhancement program that runs on Macs and PCs.

What the program does is to detect elements within the picture to enhance and unlike Photoshop, which needs you to get down to smoothening the minute details like color fringing. It uses a masking technique for you to label objects within a picture so that the program can automate the process with a preset algorithm to darken, lighten, or just change the look and feel completely.

At the moment, some of the usual presets are already geared towards more challenging digital editing with contrast controls, lighting direction as well as shaded color in water environments.

With technological advances in digital editing, what is the worth of a picture these days?

For commercial photography, it is great guns to shoot in any weather and yet produce sunny 16 results. It saves time too since you are not subjected to environmental elements on any day which could ruin your shoot. So you can literally play God with your pictures.

Death of Pure Photography

Pure photography these days are designated with a #nofilter tag on pictures but the point is, who cares? I personally do not care if you have a #nofilter tag on your digital pictures since it is shot digitally in the first place. If you stuck a #film tag on it, I would take notice.

The #nofilter tag is like telling the world you are vegetarian but do I care that you don't eat meat? You still eat #food so why should I be of interest to how you eat.

Likewise why would I be interested in a #nofilter tag when all you shoot on is with a digital camera.

Unlike analog film, there is only so much you can do to it while in the darkroom. Contrast controls are limited to what you are able to do with hand dodging. Yes, this happens when you are in a dark room where you use your hands to dodge and burn a picture to control the highlights, and shadow details while expose a sheet of photographic paper with an Enlarger.

Beyond this, you can only touch up the film medium to scrub out very small details.

The purity of analog photography is now lost for good since every picture we see these days are nothing more than a by product of the computer age.

I would not bother to go and see a photo exhibition just to witness what technology is capable of doing to a digital image. But I would pay to go and see pictures capture from a forgotten past because photographer those days used only film.

For those living in Europe, there is still a love for photography that is unseen elsewhere though I do not know how long this affair will last.

Don't get me wrong. Digital for me is a great way to learn photography, you can shoot countless frames until you get it right without costing you a dime. In film, you pay for every frame that gets wasted.

The learning curve to photography is very low these days and if you still haven't got it, you might as well take up house painting.