When I was a young lad, I loved Pink Floyd more than anything else in the world.
I loved their music. I loved their albums. And I loved their album covers, which were usually fantastic and impossible photographs.
Take this, for example:
This is the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Your first instinct these days is probably a lot like mine — this photo was created with a few beds, a clone tool, and a computer. Right?
Wrong. Storm Thorgerson actually had seven hundred beds on that beach. Other Pink Floyd album creations are similar — for example, the cover of Wish You Were Here, that man is actually on fire.
While it is clearly a matter of taste, there is something ineffably better about a beach with 700 beds on it than one with 7 beds that have been copied digitally 100 times. They are all the right size all the way down the beach, the focus is lost in a manner which is completely consistent with the depth of field used. And, perhaps most importantly, there are small differences between them, all the way down the beach. These are effects which are extremely difficult with a computer. In the Wish You Were Here photo, the man on fire looks like he is on fire, rather than on CGI fire.
The images are just more incredible, more moving. The real-world effort is visible to the naked eye, even if we cannot pinpoint the difference.
Truth be told, I knew all this stuff from when I was a kid obsessed with Pink Floyd, before I became interested in photography. But I had forgotten all about it by the time I bought my digital SLR and started to try to take interesting photos. Every photo I take is edited afterwards — it is the normal thing to do. Open it in a photo editor. Make some adjustments. Re-save the photo. I am fairly sure that everybody does it — even Mr. Thorgerson does some digital retouching, according to the interview linked to above.
But the changes I make tend to be limited to the “retouching” variety. While I am happy to crop photos, alter my camera’s own settings, make the image darker or lighter, convert it to black and white or play with the colour saturation, I do not try to change the actual image that I took. In the end, the photo is the thing.
This is not the case with everybody — there are artists such as Rosie Hardy who do some magical things with a camera and photoshop — but I would argue that images that require such drastic changes are not photography as such, but a different art form.
Seeing images such as those from Miss Hardy, or from HDR artists like Trey Radcliff have actually made me shy away from trying to take images that are fantastic in nature — images such as those produced by Mr. Thorgerson. But last week that thinking was put to rest by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, with this photo:
That photo is part of a set called Excess, and there is no photoshop involved. As Miss Guðleifsdóttir says at her blog:
Many have already seen [a different photo from the set] on Flickr, and surprisingly many of them thought the glass, cake and fork were photoshopped. (something people assume about a lot of photos of mine that aren’t faked at all).
The photo above is not faked — the artist used an oversized bowl, and baked giant sized Cheerios herself in order to create the photograph. A lot of effort went into it, but it is effort that is required to make such a fantastic photograph. It is reminiscent of the effort required for Mr. Thorgerson’s photos, and brought to light the amazing things that can be achieved with the camera alone.
Surprisingly, this was not the first time I experienced such amazement from Miss Guðleifsdóttir’s work. The first time was last year, when I read that she painted some tree branches white, and carried them around for over a year for use in a series of photographs. Somehow that display of effort failed to trigger the connection, and it took this year’s this is not photoshop commentary for such a simple concept to traverse the membrane of my thick skull.
Photoshop is not a necessity, for anything more than retouching photographs.
Similarly fantastic results are possible, through planning and effort.
Whether I am willing to put that level of effort into my own work — particularly when the first few attempts will likely result in failure — is a completely different (and open) question. But it is good to see that effort trumps photoshop.
As it should, I suppose. Things usually boil down to effort, in the end.
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