Photography Post processing

Photography - "photos" and "graphe" - Drawing with light in greek.

Photography is a visual content which has philosophical context of something between art and documentation.

Many photographers would agree that there is a thin line between art and documentary in photography and it is important to know, what is what. Especially in the time of photoshop and other photography editor programs. The trends in photography are changing the way of thinking and confusing photographers of what is right and what is wrong.

Post processing is important part of photography process. You will find photographers, who will say that true photography is capturing the light without editing and the only image that is valid is the one strait out of camera. I disagree. The history thought us that this doesn't work. Just look at the 1839 Paris photograph from Louis Dagueere. It is almost empty except one person, who appears to have his shoes polished. It wasn't empty. It was a long exposure. All people were moving and were not captured by the camera except the shoe person, who was the only one standing still. The camera wasn't able to get shorter exposure. Its actions were limited.

Post processing and manipulating? No. Pure physics.

So on this point, I disagree with the SOOC supporters. Post processing is mandatory. Why? Because the idea of photography is to draw with light the same thing that human eye see. And camera is not good enough (yet) to capture exactly as we see. And we also have the limits because of physics. Also, the SOOC supporters would find themselves in awkward situation using wide or zoom lenses and using long exposures or high ISO, because this is what human eye cannot see. That's why we also have post processing.

And of course (thank god for this) we have genres. Here we can draw the line between art and documentation. If you ask me, the landscape photography and it's varieties, falls into the art part of photography, where post processing and manipulation are allowed. On the other side, we have photojournalism, documentary photography and reportages, where post processing should be limited and manipulations not allowed, because they can change the story of the image.

Documentary photography:

So, when I was working on Nat Geo assignment, I did't even think about removing some parts of the image out. I could use a lower aperture to blur it, but never remove it. Just basic post processing - enhancing the contrast, colours, simple dodge and burn - realistic things that eye is capable to see and camera is not. Some photographers were deleting or adding some parts of images (the Steve McCurry scandals), some of them were staged (World Press Photo 2015 and HIPA 2018) and so on.