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They will accept montages in our competitions - I won with one two years ago. Last year I put far too much on and agreed with the critique on that.

People can have a good guess who did any montages - or who entered a rat picture in the 'pets' class!

Other than cropping, levels and unsharp mask I don't normally do much to my images as I like them to reflect things as they are. One exception is that when doing the guest house where I stay a lot, I kept the lamp post and wires, which are fixtures, but cloned out the scaffolding for some temporary work on the chimney!
The best angle to approach a problem is the try angle.

Ann


Ann's Gallery
The Royal Photographic Society (no less) do not make distinctions about what constitutes a landscape, and generally include the term 'seascape' in the same category...... same with lakes, rivers etc.

I often come up against the question of what exactly some organisations (like CAPA, the Canadian equivalent of the RPS) mean when they say things like "The photographer may make enhancements that could have been done in the camera (zooms, pans, multiple exposures, blurs), cropping, or modifications that can be done in the digital darkroom, which improves the photographic presentation of the subject. Heavily manipulated images must be entered in the Digital ‘Altered Reality’ Competition category."........ so at what point does some digital enhancement (aka 'photoshopping') step over the line to become "Heavily manipulated"? I know roughly what they mean, but where's the border?

The only place I've seen the content of the photograph strictly defined is in "Nature"....... every major photographic body that organises competitions usually sticks with the guidelines of the "International Federation of Photographic Art", which defines it, in brief, as "Without any sign of the hand of humans, but with a very few exceptions, like animals adapting to environments modified by humans" (e.g. Barn Owls - without man-made barns they wouldn't be 'Barn Owls', right? Likewise, "City" Pigeons, I suppose) Where "Nature" differs from all other themes, is in placing tight restrictions on what constitutes 'digital enhancement', where they say, "Any manipulation or modification to the original image is limited to minor retouching of blemishes and must not alter the content of the original scene".

The whole thing is very interesting, though.....
I recently added a little article that one of our members had found, onto this page http://www.kingstonphotographicclub.ca/gallerie.htm#diary on my club website (the part beginning with "Diane also pointed out....."
PSE6 on WinXP, Pentax K10d...... and now a Canon G10.

Gallery
I enjoyed reading, "Diane pointed out..."
That debate will continue forever and I recall photo magazine articles from the 1950s wherein zealots would decry so much as cropping the negative image.

Rather than attempting to define "photography", I think the only sensible approach - as Diane commented - is to clearly define the rules of a contest or rules of an event.

I was at a gallery show three weeks ago that was limited to black and white photographs. Two doors down was a gallery exhibiting only watercolor paintings and next door to that was a collection of really strange stuff assembled from 'found objects'.

Every bit of it was art. The rules of each show were different.

Rusty
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness" - Dave Barry

If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. - Robert Capa

www.prestophoto.com/photos/gallery/19932
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,Nellie! Talk about opening up a can of worms...........
I guess HDR renditions will have to be in a category of its own,hmm? Which is really quite amusing because HDR photos are supposed to make the photo look more like what you actually saw. Unless you go way overboard with the tone mapping treatment.
Even "Ansel the Great" dodged and burned his masterpieces. I supposed the rule
makers for competitions would rule out his creations also. As long as humans (with their subjectiveness) judge photo competitions, the results will be subjective to the likes and dislikes of the judges.
Chas
Chas's Gallery
f/16 on a sunny day.....:)
chas3stix wrote: HDR photos are supposed to make the photo look more like what you actually saw.


I'd go along with that, although perhaps the wonderful processor we call the brain actually takes what the eyes 'give' it and does some HDR-ing for us. One setup for HDR is to have an interior shot of a normally-lit room, but be able to show details through a window and outside - at the same time. I'm sure our eyes/brain can do it but that difference between the interior and exterior can be as much as 6 or 7 stops of light. It's a real estate agent's dream to have interior photographs that have almost no shadows in a room and be able to see something through a window.

Quite heavy photographic manipulation has been with us for at least 150 years - William Notman, in Montreal, was one of the pioneers of photographing individual people and then putting them together in groups - using early 'cut and paste' techniques. See this interesting site.....http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/keys/virtualexhibits/notmanstudio/themes/composites/

Oh, and "Ansel the Great"...... here's an interesting video http://digital-photography-school.com/moon-over-hernandez-an-insight-into-ansel-adams- that "Moon over Hernandez" was actually not all that inspiring until he worked on his prints for hours - he'd have loved Photoshop, wouldn't he? Photoshop is to a wet darkroom what a washing machine is to scrubbing your clothes on a rock beside a river.
PSE6 on WinXP, Pentax K10d...... and now a Canon G10.

Gallery
Thanks for the link,Geoff.
Chas
Chas's Gallery
f/16 on a sunny day.....:)
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