A couple of months ago I invited a discussion by introducing the idea of in-camera vs. post-processing of images and invited you to give me your ideas of what’s fair and what’s not.  I was pleased and almost overwhelmed by your response; a lot of you have been thinking about this, and were willing to share your thoughts.  As I had suspected, opinions are all over the map from the pretty much anything goes—“Photoshop away, its all part of the continuum of the art” view, to the strict orthodox view that photographers use cameras, not computers, and the image is done when the shutter is pressed.  I promised to give my slant on this later, and for what it’s worth, here it is.

There are separate elements here, pragmatic, artistic, and ethical are at least some to be considered, and there is overlap.  Please carefully note as well that I write here from the viewpoint of an automotive magazine photographer, vastly different from news photography, scientific photography and forensic photography, to name a few.

This photo of the second generation 997 from Senior Editor Joe Rusz was chosen to be the basis of the August cover this year, but was horizontal rather than vertical and needed more snap to be a dramatic cover image.

Cropped and sized to fit our format, internal contrast was altered to emphasize the play of shadows on the car and accentuate the new LED lights below the headlights; potentially distracting elements were darkened.

Start with the pragmatic:  A Panorama cover is always vertical, and it is a “funny” size, 7.25 X 10.125 inches (not the same proportions as the camera image output) so there is no avoiding cropping an image, no matter how immaculate the concept/execution in camera.  We fairly often—much more so in the digital age—convert a portion of a horizontal image to a vertical, and it is not unknown to add necessary height to an image by cloning some unimportant foreground or background, perhaps just in a corner of an image that needed some rotation.  Likewise, a major story that opens with a “double truck” (two page full spread) image requires a horizontal picture of the same height as the cover, but at a bit over 14 inches wide, chosen not only because it is appropriate to the story and graphically interesting, but also because there is enough open space to accommodate the title and the “deck” for the story.

Bruce Anderson’s shot of the V-10 Carrera GT engine on a test stand at Weissach was technically excellent, but the distracting background was unavoidable.

With the engine selected and the background converted to a neutral grey, the details of the engine can be easily separated from other elements in the original picture.

The vast majority of my images at this point are born digital, and like all digital images, they are manipulated by the algorithms in the camera (otherwise there would be no image recognizable by the human eye) and later by a specific computer imaging program, which in my case is currently Photoshop 11 (CS4).  After the digital file goes to Panorma’s printer, they will often make additional minor alterations so insure that the printed output matches the proof that accompanies the digital file, and sometimes there is considerable going back and forth between us on adjustments before Pano goes on the press.

Images are adjusted for brightness, contrast, and color routinely; in the magazine as a whole but particularly within a given story, it is important to maintain consistency as well as an attractive balance.  Sometimes color profiles must be changed: submissions for “From the Regions” typically are in color and must be converted to black and white; in the film days this often produced overly contrasty results, now the opposite with rather flat images; both needing modulation.

Shot on film at a Parade several years ago, this was my only photograph of a car that later in the day won its class; the owner had left early, and the choices included showing the car in this unattractive condition or leaving it out of Panorama altogether, neither desirable.

 

Here we employed the solution of removing the cover and rebuilding the top as well as some of the area behind the car cover.  There has been some color correction and contrast change as well.  Is it what I saw when I made the shot?  No.  Is it an honest representation that filled the needs of the magazine, and thus our readers?  I think so.

 

 

A word about film:  although it has been sanctified by some as offering a truer description of visual “reality” (and I don’t want to even get into whether people see the same; they don’t) than the digital files, film is little more that a physical chemical interpretation of the visual world subject to its own eccentricities and capable of producing a wide range of final results from the same exposure.  It is quite subject to manipulation by a wide variety of means, and quite idiosyncratic in its reportage.  And it has to be scanned—digitized—before it goes to the printer anyway.

What about ethics?  Well, you don’t remove blemishes from cars you want to sell, and I’ve got a real problem with what was done in the 50’s and 60’s by using a modified camera that exposed film that was held in a curved rather than a flat position to produce the “longer, lower, wider” effect for advertising copy.  I don’t have any real guilt pangs from doing the tweaks described above in my processing routine, in working on individual parts of a picture (like lightening up the shadow below the bill of a driver’s cap), or of doing the quite extensive changes involved in moving an image from the area of pure documentation to a cross between photography and graphic art that we sometimes use for our covers.  And if there is a Bud can in the back seat or a telephone pole that seems to be growing out of the roof of the car, its history.  You can argue all you like that the photographer should have seen the pitfall and avoided it before the image was made, and you won’t get much argument back from me, but at this point in the process it is a correctable error, not a rack on which to break a careless photographer.

My job as I see it is to produce an end product—whether the original photograph was mine or a contribution from another PCA member—that is fitted to the job it does for our magazine, improving the image where I can, creating visual interest, but trying to avoid the excesses and clichés that are easily produced with digital image manipulation (often the mark of someone new to the process).  It’s a moving target, and I don’t always succeed, but there is a lot of satisfaction in the effort.



 

 

 

 

I shot this image (Sebring, off one of the bridges) on Kodachrome many years ago.  It languished in our files until being used as the basis for a cover several years ago, although the dimensions were wrong for the cover and undesirable black margins had to be added to make it work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

Seeing some potential for a striking cover that was more graphic than photographic, the scan of the 917 was extensively altered digitally (including slightly moving the decal in the upper right hand corner to enhance the symmetry) and became our February 2007 cover.  If this type of manipulation was done to represent a car for sale I would consider it dishonest, but I feel comfortable with this usage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keep shooting and let me hear from you at: leonardt@pca.org.  And special thanks to everyone who shared their feelings with me on the questions raised in last month’s blog; more on that later.