Digital BW, The Print

> You missed the point.  It's a fact that a LOT of photography is about
> accurate reproduction of a scene.  What you took a picture of, is what you
> took a picture of, plain and simple, in and of the image it self.  What it
> represents is something possibly different, but it's at least accurate to
> what the eye saw.  We're not talking about crime scene photography here,
> which is not related, in my opinion, to this discussion.

Austin,

the point is that photography can never accurately reproduce a scene (at the
most banal level, all photographs arrest the flow of time, extracting a
fraction of a second - a fraction far to short for the eye to register - and
so the instant the photograph is taken, it becomes unreal and inaccurate - a
construct). The photograph you produce is merely an attempt to represent
what you, the photographer, saw. To insist it is (or can be) an accurate (or
true) reproduction is simplistic at best and certainly inaccurate.

And to bring it back to the Photoshop question, the adjustments or
manipulations made in PS or the darkroom are so far down the line in this
process and so crude as to have little important bearing on the truth or
otherwise of the image.


Tim