Philosophy - TrustImage and this site

In the twentieth century up until the 1990s people used to say 'the camera never lies' and believe it. It was never true, of course, but in the era of analogue photography picture manipulation after shooting was difficult and time consuming, involving sharp knives, sable brushes, 100 shades of ink and a steady hand. Even with skill, post-shot tampering often left residual evidence. 

Digital photography changed all that. It changed the process, with many levels of undo. It changed the possibilities, and indeed many digital photography magazines devote a lot of space to tutorials on how to improved your photographs after taking it, by adding better skies, taking out unwanted lamp-posts, dustbins or ex-spouses. 

Not everybody who takes digital pictures changes them in that sort of way afterwards. What is manipulation anyway? Some manipulation and selectivity is inherent in the process of taking a picture at all. By definition you choose your standpoint and your moment - you elect to photograph this subject, at this time. More subtly, you choose your field of view, your scale of foreground and background, and what segment of the brightness scale you will try and capture faithfully. 

Likewise, not everybody who looks at an image cares about its provenance or whether it has been manipulated post-exposure. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for the point of view that the image should stand on its own merits, and certainly for fine-art photography the aesthetics of the final image itself are what separates the sheep from the goats. In art the rule is there are no rules, and all this talk of manipulation is irrelevant. Of course, some fine art photographers will choose to define their art by a lack of manipulation, but that doesn't make their art any better, just different.

This site is about standing stones, not about photography. As such, you, dear reader, should be entitled to some expectations. The simplest would be that you could identify a site from one of my pictures. Additionally, you might feel entitled to ask that, had you stood at the same point in space and time, you would have seen the same scene as depicted in the photo.

FoundView, originally on the now defunct www.foundview.org was an early attempt to retrieve some of the innocence lost in the digital world. FoundView tried to separate manipulation to create an image at all from all other manipulation. It even had a natty logo, an idea its successor could do well to adopt.

I liked the idea. And though FoundView is no more, the principles have a resonance for me. To wit

"The presence of the FoundView checkmark on this page guarantees that every photograph on it depicts the forms and shapes that the camera recorded the moment the shutter was clicked--no more, and no less. Any post-shutter manipulations were limited to tonal variations; no one involved in producing the photographs moved, added, deleted (except by cropping), or otherwise altered any forms or shapes in the photographs after the shutter was clicked."

You can read more about FoundView on the archived website http://www.vad1.com/photo/foundview/  For some reason it didn't survive much past the turn of the century - despite the problem it addressed getting even worse.

TrustImage is a more recent attempt to do the same thing. Because it was current when I started to think about this in earnest, I use TrustImage. Like this.

The story behind this story

I learned to take photographs before digital, so I didn't grow up with a world where you would take out power lines as a matter of course. Digital photography opened new opportunities - freed from the tyranny of film costs I could experiment more, and took far more pictures. Because you have to digitise photos to put them on the web, on a very small number of the stone pictures I did take out some ugly anachronisms such as power lines, but I became uneasy with what I was doing, as it related to this site. I revisited FoundView , only to find it had been one of those heady pre-millennial things, and it had died in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. My photographs could probably not have met FoundView standards because I sometimes use polarizing filters and graduated filters to control the dynamic range entering the camera, and I was never able to understand whether this was okay for FoundView or not, but my interpretation leaned to "not okay". TrustImage also address this issue explicitly and my usage complies, given the nature of my subjects.

Swapping skies

One of the tutorials that comes up in digital photography magazines again and again is broadly along the theme of "Improve you photos by swapping a boring sky for a really fabulous one". I was once tempted, and got halfway through, before I asked myself the simple question.

Self, why are you doing this?

Don't get me wrong - if you're a travel writer and you just need that shot of a moody Venice sunset but  the trip was rained off, the budget's spent and you  have a lot of pictures form last year in Venice when the sunsets were fab then the reason is both good, and it is obvious. I had no good answer-  other than I had started, so I'll finish so I know how to do it, if I can ever work out why I should. The result looked better that it had a right to, but it was a path that was not for me.

I don't swap skies in stone pictures, because the mood of a stone is about place, and time, and light, and the observer as well as the stones. Swapping skies would lack integrity in the context of this site, though sometimes it would deliver a better image. Sometimes the place and time are right but the light isn't, sometimes the place and light are right but the time isn't - it's all an excuse to see an ancient site a different day under a new sky, and a photograph is not the only thing a megalithic site does for me. Swapping skies on a photo of an ancient site may be exactly the right thing to do for some people, some viewers and some sites, - that I choose not to do it is not a negative comment on those with different skills, talents and aims from me, who do. 

Why should you care?

Care only if knowing whether a picture was manipulated post-taking matters to you. I'm not saying you should care - just if you do, then the extra information I present means this, which may or may not be useful to you. Your mind, your views, your call. There's a good body of well-informed, if seriously geeky thought that thinks this is all a load of pretentious claptrap. Lots of people agree with them. They may well be right - Foundview foundered on some of its internal inconsistencies.