How real is real?

Go read this thought provoking news item about how much Photoshoppin' is acceptable in photojournalism.

In a nutshell, a Danish photojournalist turned the saturation and contrast in his RAW files up to 11, as is the fashion these days in editorial / design photography, and entered them into a contest. Judges said, that's not what journalism looks like, and demanded to see his RAW files for comparison.

It's interesting to see how those original files are needed to stand in for some kind of objective reality. It's not as if stuff like this wasn't possible in pre-digital darkrooms, and it's not like you can ever view a RAW file without some rendering/intent decisions being made -- either by you or some software engineer.

Nobody's asking me, but I would say there's a big difference between local and global adjustments. Anything you can do to a digital file without making a selection falls in to one level of manipulation, and anything involving a selection or other pixel-pushing (layer, mask, rubberstamping, etc) falls into another. Any time you open a RAW file in Photoshop, you're already at level one.

And this bit is just incorrect:

"He deliberately chose a chair and made it yellow, and so he chose the wall and made the blue," said Peter Dejong. "For me it is unacceptable."

To me it seems like the area in question is well within the possibilities of global color adjustment from RAW.

From John Nack.

(Update -- machine-translated link above can be wonky; here's a page on the original site -- in Danish.)

Brutalism

You know those full spectrum "sunlight therapy" lamps that supposedly relieve us Ice People from Seasonal Affective Disorder? Someone needs to engineer flat panel monitors so they use the same kind of light source.

Since we just sit in the gloom staring at screens all the time.

Burnet Woods

A plastic bag within a glade.

windshields of the midwest - week 52/week1

North Dakota

Indiana

One of those other states that begins with an I.

Happy Solstice

Two shots outside my office window near the end of the year.

Yes

It's really true about surgery these days; everyone shows up asking you for your full name and birth date, and why you're here today, and which knee it is that they're going to operate on.

And someone really did inscribe the word "yes" on me, like a charm, to affirm to all who could see that I was going to get arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Without seeing the charm, the surgeon cannot make the cut.

Seals at Chatham

They silently bobbed up and down the beach after us, heads pointed in our direction.

prospect park

Stigs and Marcie had their first birthday party in Prospect Park, and we happened to be passing through....

Jack

die geist von frankfurt west bahnhof

Photoshop CS2 is so nifty. Still finding new menu items like "Lens Correction..."

frankfurt west bahnhof

23 hours in Brussels

Checked in to the hotel at around 10 PM and found that it was in a fairly anonymous outlying suburb, near the client but far from any restaurant. The bartender advised me not to go outside, for though the night looked cold and empty, gangs of North Africans roamed the neighborhood looking to mug anyone who didn't speak French or Flemish. Must be some kind of rougher version of the Académie française. So all I had for dinner was two Leffes from the bar and a bag of peanuts from the hotel room fridge.

the mercure

Building in back is the hotel.

Mouse on Mars

Saw them at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. These are the only pictures on this blog with no adjustments in Photoshop.

Rucola mit Parmaschinken am Elba

Took me a while to figure out that this tart leaf was the same thing as arugula. This place just off Hamburger Allee put it on the pizza after the bake, along with thin panes of parmesan. At left, Carolina has her Parmaschinken raw.

Frankfurt Hochstraße

Through Günter's car window.

Frankfurt -- outside the Mercure apartments

Victor Hugo a habite cette maison

Browsing for chocolate in Brussels feels like going to the jewelry district. And neither chocolate nor diamonds can be found in the Belgian earth.

Stuttgart park

Walking around the morning after the Mouse on Mars concert.

Concrete Volcanoes in Stuttgart

I called Henry from this park and he surfed over to maps.google.com to try to identify what these things are: art, or some kind of Morlockian forced-air cooling system. Ideas?