2003-12-01 by Anthony G. Atkielski
Dennis W. Manasco writes:
> I looked through the photographs on Mr. Morgan's site and found them
> not only extraordinarily pleasing but extremely well composed,
> photographed and rendered.
I find them aesthetically pleasing overall, and well composed, if that
matters. I had not originally offered any comment on that aspect of the
photos. I noticed only the routine underexposure and the Photoshop
retouching, and I wondered what the reasons for both might have been.
> If any of them were underexposed it has
> escaped my attention.
I noticed that some images had more contrast than I would expect between
light and dark areas, and the patterns of this were consistent with
selective Photoshop modification of brightness, although it was
difficult to say whether some areas had been lightened or others
darkened.
> I would appreciate it if Mr. Atkielski would quote us chapter and
> verse on the images which he finds "underexposed."
Just look at the EXIF data: the exposure compensation is given for each
photo, and for most photos, there is a deliberate underexposure of from
1/3 to 2 stops. Since deliberate underexposure in this way is only
possible with operator intervention, I wondered why it was done.
> I would also appreciate his pointing out those he finds
> "heavily Photoshopped" and explain why he thinks them so.
I don't have the images in front of me now, but most of the Photoshop
modifications were fairly obviously brushed in. After you've
Photoshopped ten thousand images or so, you get pretty good at spotting
it in other photos. It's getting harder and harder to find photos that
have _not_ been tweaked substantially in Photoshop.
> I also viewed Mr. Atkielski's site. There were not very many images
> to view.
FWIW, currently there are over 1100 images on the site, although I don't
have an exact count.
> Those that I saw were interesting.
Thanks.
> Sadly, they were also often flat and (IMHO) either over, or
> under, exposed.
I'm not sure what you mean by flat; most were shot on Provia, which is
fairly contrasty and saturated compared to real life.
Exposure was as the meter indicated; I rarely compensate manually unless
it is clear that the on-board metering has been fooled by unusual
conditions (and that almost never happens, especially with matrix
metering). For MF shots, I meter manually with an incident-light meter.
Every photo on my site has been through Photoshop, of course, but
usually the only adjustments are overall curves, to correct gamma,
contrast, overall luminosity, etc., and to balance colors. I don't
actually modify image composition at all, except for a few photos up in
the towers of Notre-Dame where the metal fencing was so obtrusive that
it ruined the images (I removed it).
In keeping with the topic of the list, the Street Scenes section of my
site contains a bit under 200 black and white images. All but a handful
were shot on film, usually Tri-X (others include Portra 400BW, Tech Pan,
T-Max 100 and 400, and a few RGB conversions from Provia or other
films).