Dark skies and other matters

[David M]

May I continue the conversation on how we see images, which began with Vieri’s reply to my own comments on his Iceland portfolio? The original post has become, shall we say, very diverse.
Firstly, the final version of Moonrise is very different from the original scene. On the negative, the sky is lighter than the foreground. Ansel’s final versions reverse this entirely. I continue to admire his scholarship in calculating the exposure in his head, balanced on a parked vehicle, with a young son who needed to be taken home, using inconvenient units and getting within a stop of an optimum exposure. We must also admire his ability to recognise the potential value of the scene. A straight print is rather dull.

We began with the rendering of moving water. It’s a good point that we don’t see moving water as either smooth featureless grey, or as a Harold Edgerton milk drop, but somewhere in between. Both seem legitimate products of the photographic process. Both seem to extend our knowledge of the world around us. Leonardo, possibly the most inquisitive man who ever lived, seems to have been fascinated, too.

One aspect of photography that I’ve never seen celebrated is out-of-focus blur. We do not see this blur ourselves. As soon as we look at an object our eyes adjust to make it sharp and we have no control of this. We ourselves live in a world of infinite depth-of-field, unlike our cameras. In this aspect of seeing, a Vermeer is closer to our experienced reality.
Controlling blur is obviously of great and continuing interest to LF photographers. Curiously, it’s now of interest to mobile phone maker, but in the opposite sense limiting sharpness. Funny old world, innit?

 

[MartyNL]

Is it possible for you to define or expand on 'blur' a wee bit?

 

[thronobulax]

We began with the rendering of moving water. It’s a good point that we don’t see moving water as either smooth featureless grey, or as a Harold Edgerton milk drop, but somewhere in between. Both seem legitimate products of the photographic process. Both seem to extend our knowledge of the world around us. Leonardo, possibly the most inquisitive man who ever lived, seems to have been fascinated, too.

One aspect of photography that I’ve never seen celebrated is out-of-focus blur. We do not see this blur ourselves. As soon as we look at an object our eyes adjust to make it sharp and we have no control of this. We ourselves live in a world of infinite depth-of-field, unlike our cameras. In this aspect of seeing, a Vermeer is closer to our experienced reality.
Controlling blur is obviously of great and continuing interest to LF photographers. Curiously, it’s now of interest to mobile phone maker, but in the opposite sense limiting sharpness. Funny old world, innit?

I would argue that photography is a construct made from the raw material of what exists in actual fact. The presence- or absence of blur in water or the out of focus "bokeh" of a close shot are just more brushes in the toolkit. We don't take pictures, we make them.

Unfortunately, photography has now been with us long enough, and - more importantly, is now so easily digitally malleable - that many of these ideas have the potential to be seen as trite and overused idioms. But that doesn't make them inherently something to be discarded.
In my own work, I am rarely interested in a faithful rendering of what is actually in the scene. I am more concerned with what I can make out if it.

"Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger." He also noted, "There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." - Avedon

 

[David M]

This is an unexpected question. I had imagined that an audience of photographers would know. I’m suggesting that out-of-focus blur is one of the gifts that photography has brought to the world.
Firstly, I suppose we need to ask what sharpness is and say that blur is the absence of sharpness - a reciprocal definition. The degree of blurring is then the amount of lack of sharpness. I’m in a bit of a quandary about what units to use. Circle of Confusion, perhaps?
There seems to be a good deal of work available on optimum viewing distance for photographs, but I’m not sure if it’s relevant here.
I did try to make a distinction between camera vision and human vision. A camera lens stays where it is until it’s moved, so that its point of focus does not alter until that change is made. Moving the object that was formerly in focus does not alter the position of the lens and so the object becomes less sharp.
We know that a camera lens and the eye use different processes to achieve focus, but I suggest we can ignore that at present, unless someone has a supplementary suggestion to make.
The lens in the eye is not operated externally, as is a camera lens. It functions automatically and beyond our conscious control, so that everywhere we direct our gaze appears in focus. As an object approaches us, they remain sharp, all the way from distant to close.
It may well be the case that objects on the periphery of vision are blurred. If you direct your attention to them, you will find that you cannot see the blur. Similarly with near and far objects. Everything that you give attention to appears sharp.
You will see that I’m assuming normal human vision and ignoring the complications of long and short sight. I’m also ignoring the effect of format size in photography. Animals presumably live in a different visual world; cats see less colour but are more sensitive to movement and much more sensitive in darkness; hawks can see like a hawk; prey species seem to see all round; as for insects…
I feel that this may not be the answer the question you asked. Would you like to continue? I’ll do my best.

 

[MartyNL]

Let's be clear, I believe we're referring to the two dimensional representation of vision as in a photograph?

 

[David M]

Yes indeed. All the above applies if you close one eye.

 

[MartyNL]

This is an unexpected question. I had imagined that an audience of photographers would know. I’m suggesting that out-of-focus blur is one of the gifts that photography has brought to the world.

Firtly, I think the concept of blur or (un)sharp is in itself blurry!
And secondly, the f64 group, we're not so enamoured by the gift of-out-of-focus blur.

Meanwhile, not only is the science of blur challenging, at least for me, but perhaps even more contentious, is the artistic merit of blur.

 

[MartyNL]

We began with the rendering of moving water. It’s a good point that we don’t see moving water as either smooth featureless grey, or as a Harold Edgerton milk drop, but somewhere in between. Both seem legitimate products of the photographic process. Both seem to extend our knowledge of the world around us.

My question here is;
Does the blur through movement, intentional or otherwise, equate to blur through dof?

 

[David M]

I rather like sharpness, too.
On the other hand, unsharpness is currently making inroads into photography. It now has a name – bokeh. I believe that the way this word is currently used is not quite its original meaning, but my Japanese language skills are non-existent.
Perhaps more significantly, your iPhone will now blur the background of your selfies to make them "better." I can't define what kind of betterness this is, I'm afraid. This may be of little interest to the LF community. If they want a softer background, they have to long had the means to produce it.

People who know everything used to point out that "the camera cannot lie" was false, citing the number of untrue photographs available. Stalin often mentioned. Of course, they were wrong. An unconscious apparatus can neither lie nor tell the truth. It's photographers who construct the lies, often encouraged by ruthless dictators.
However, in these latter days. we have cameras that can and do lie. As well as altering backgrounds, I believe they can improve complexions and perform a host of other kindly services that I can't be bothered to explore.

There are other kinds of unsharpness that we haven't mentioned. Motion blur, for instance. Magazines used to publish articles on how to follow a speeding car, so the background turned into streaks. Conversely, the speeding car could become streaky by keeping the camera still. Neither effect is available to the unaided human eye.
As well as water, wind can be pressed into service, to convert a tree's leaves into a cloud or a field of corn into an ocean.

There are all kinds of unintentional unsharpness too, but we don't want to relive our past tragedies, do we?

 

[Ian Grant]

I think you also need to include some kind of definition of a "Fine Art Print" here's a Wikipedia page.

Perhaps in the case of dodging and burning, whether in a darkroom or post processing digitally, it is how skillfully it is done, as opposed to being oviously overdone. So with Ansel Adams you wouldn't be able to spot it unless you saw a different perhaps earlier print.

It is also being aware of the work of leading Fine Art photographers, the nuances in a print. With B&W landscape here in the UK it's John, Blakemore, John Davies, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Fay Godwin, Ray Moore, etc, inthe US AA, Minor White, the Westons, Robert Adams etc.

Ian

 

[David M]

MartyML has overlapped me.
I've been avoiding this question. Yes and no, I think. Julia Margaret Cameron adjusted her focus to the "artistic point". Nowadays, her portraits don't excite so much criticism as they did at the time. To our eyes, they simply look "old", but to her contemporaries this was very noticeable. She was not a fastidious technician and her reputation rests on the way she coaxed expressive portraits from her famous contemporaries.
There is however a case where motion blur is used to mimic DoF blur. Victorians liked painted backgrounds in their portraits, but not everyone wanted that, so if someone wanted a plain background, a white sheet would be hung where the view of mountains (or whatever) had been hung before and an assistant would shake the sheet so as to even out any detail of texture or folds. Exposeures were generally long enough to make this quite practical in those good old days. The effect would rather like using a Big Stopper at the seaside. Motion blur mimicking focus blur.
I suspect that all the members of this forum would be able to distinguish between different approaches to the distribution of sharpness and form a judgement on how appropriately it had been used. Probably a good few members of Camera Clubs too.

...and we haven't even mentioned pinholes! Yet.

 

[David M]

Aha! Fine Art Print.
I've taken this phrase from my viewing of YouTube videos. It seems popular among the users of Big Stoppers "Give it more of a fine art feel." is the kind of thing they say to explain their practice. I'm afraid you'll have to put in the hours, watching them give out their advice to understand more.
In this context, fine art seems to be equated with hanging over the fireplace or above the sofa from which television is watched. I came across one photographer (I forget his name) who would sell you a print to match the length of your sofa. Customer service of the highest order. I wonder what percentage of photographs end up on walls today.
I strongly suggest that we should take the long way round if we feel tempted to enter the "Yes but is it Art?" debate.

 

[Ian Grant]

My take is Fine Art is whether a serious gallery or collector would exhibit or buy the work. That leaves "Fine Art Photography" quite wide in scope.

Ian

 

[David M]

Well, this is a reasonable and practical system to adopt, but it does hand things over to others.
A definition as such would enable you to distinguish fine art while alone on a desert island, in the same way that we might distinguish a coconut from a crab.
For myself. I don't think that's really possible and your working system is as good as it gets, or indeed, can get. A consensus of the well-informed. The history of art is littered with things that weren't art, until suddenly they were. Remember when you could get a decent Impressionist painting for a glass of wine?

Incidentally, those clever Victorians didn't think that a photograph could be artistic at all unless it had been interfered with by human hands. Hence Bromoil and suchlike. I'm sure you know about this sort of thing.

 

[Ian Grant]

I should have added : or on a par with. After all, not everyone wants to exhibit in a gallery or sell prints.

In the 1989 Exhibition "The Art of Photography" there was some superb Victorian era image, I'm thinking of Aubrey - A Study of Leaves. Braun - Sill Life with Game. That's not to be confused with Pictorialism which does use alternative technique far more.

Ian

 

[David M]

Yes, clearly there’s a kind of ladder of prestige, from (shall we say?) the Mona Lisa on the top rung to (shall we say again?) the pictures on Father’s Day cards.