"That said, I would love to market my photos as unmanipulated."
In my opinion, each conversion you do in this process:
1. going from real world light to camera 2. going from camera to computer screen or 2. going from camera to printer ink
is an imagine manipulation. The camera is automatically doing lots of crazy stuff to translate light in to color data.... it's not a simple "unprocessed" or "raw" mapping by any means. Likewise, printers and your computer screen (but especially printers) are doing another crazy mapping -- indeed, that's why things look different on screen vs. ink, or on different color printers... So I think "unmanipulated" is a myth. Even if I go straight to film and then develop in the darkroom, I'm still making choices about exposure time, etc. in the darkroom.
So I think that minor changes like the ones you showed so far are fair game to say "unmanipulated" if you feel it's necessary. Cutting and pasting is going to far... and maybe you don't like the idea of editing individual parts of an image (like the sky vs. the ground) separately... although they even showed us things like that in the darkroom in photography 101. Anyway, I think you should treat color/exposure enhancement, at least at the level of the whole picture, as a normal part of the photo-development process, not something "unnatural".
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-01-24 11:24 am (UTC)In my opinion, each conversion you do in this process:
1. going from real world light to camera
2. going from camera to computer screen
or 2. going from camera to printer ink
is an imagine manipulation. The camera is automatically doing lots of crazy stuff to translate light in to color data.... it's not a simple "unprocessed" or "raw" mapping by any means. Likewise, printers and your computer screen (but especially printers) are doing another crazy mapping -- indeed, that's why things look different on screen vs. ink, or on different color printers... So I think "unmanipulated" is a myth. Even if I go straight to film and then develop in the darkroom, I'm still making choices about exposure time, etc. in the darkroom.
So I think that minor changes like the ones you showed so far are fair game to say "unmanipulated" if you feel it's necessary. Cutting and pasting is going to far... and maybe you don't like the idea of editing individual parts of an image (like the sky vs. the ground) separately... although they even showed us things like that in the darkroom in photography 101. Anyway, I think you should treat color/exposure enhancement, at least at the level of the whole picture, as a normal part of the photo-development process, not something "unnatural".