Liars & Photographers

Liar, Liar, pants on fire! This was a common shout out when I was a kid. You could use it to shame your neighborhood pals. It didn’t have to be directed at a true liar, but it was a powerful way to get someone to shut up without losing a friendship.

I am not sure we can do that with our fellow photographers. Like politicians, it is pretty much understood that there is freedom to fudge on the truth in our work. After all, it is an art. What would art be without the flexibility to interpret it as we want? This would be part of our artistic vision.

The concern is when we are pulling the wool over the eyes of our fans with our art. Painters start with an empty canvas and provide only the amount of reality they want. This is understood. Photographers start with a substantially complete canvas and create the reality they want with deletions and replacements. This is not so well understood. By writing this article I am freeing myself up from policing police other photographers. Instead, I prefer to compliment those who depict nature, even with improvements, but not with lies. And I am putting it in the hands of you consumers to decide what is acceptable as you buy art.

Photographers are quick to point out that the files that come out of the camera don’t accurately depict the actual colors that are present. They are simply digital files containing as much of the information necessary to the create a scene from the information a camera's sensor is capable of capturing. Photographers also point out that the impressive images that come out of your smartphone have been highly altered by built-in software to make them more attractive. 

Just like we have come to accept a politician’s overstatements because that’s what they do and the promises sound good, we are willing to accept a phone’s or photographer’s “over-editing” both because that is what they do and that is what we think looks good. Increasingly complicated tax codes encourage cheating. Photographers are faced with similar, less illegal temptations to expand their prior boundaries with the newest capabilities of editing software. But it crosses my line when it comes to lying. You may draw your line at a different spot than I do. 

Here are some things most of us accept or like from photographers:

1. Getting rid of distractions, such as dust spots, pieces of litter and edge distractions. After all, who wanted that pimple showing in their senior portrait? Thank goodness for this retouching!
2. (Over) saturating colors. Color sells. Many photographers who are in the marketplace find that their colorful, saturated prints are strong sellers. This leads them to look for more saturated scenes (e.g. sunsets) and edit with more saturation. This is artistic license that plays to the audience, which should be acceptable whether you agree with it or not. 
3. Distorting objects. This includes making mountains larger and stretching distractive areas off the edge of the frame. Photographers use a wide variety of lenses, most of which distort scenes from the way our eye sees them. Distortions are part of the art and are acceptable in all but photo contests and photojournalism.
4. Adding or subtracting light. Light draws our eye. A photographer should be able create the vision for an image by adding or subtracting light (brightness) from select areas of a scene. This includes creating sun rays or sun stars. But read point 4 in the next section to see where this is not acceptable. 
5. Replacing skies. Combining camera techniques with post processing software lets us take a too bright sky and reduce the brightness so we can see it more like our eye sees it. But we can also replace an uninteresting sky with an interesting sky or even a Milky Way that wasn’t there. Based on comments I see on Facebook (not my own photos) viewers tend to really like these sky replacements. This means photographers will keep replacing skies since we all like positive feedback. While not all sky edits or replacements are done skillfully, these changes are received well. But the photographer can also be a liar (see point 2 below).
6. Composite photos. Combining parts of two or more images to create a single more compelling image is common. I have used this technique to create the feeling that I had at sunrise in the photo below. The brilliant orange cloud at sunrise was present just a few minutes before the sun actually appeared on the horizon. Then the sun hit the horizon, that color disappeared. Combining two images gave more of the feeling I had at the time. Short of a video, this was the only way to show it. Most images with stars and an in-focus foreground are also composite images. When a photo is a composite, it should be identified as such when the composited items are not naturally there at the same time. A composite of different focus points or different exposures would not need to be identified as a composite since our eye can adjust for light and focus that can't be shown in a single photo.