I wish I could force people to post the sooc version of images they post on here...
Rather than "force", why don't you just ask them politely when you see one you wonder about? Saves a ton of bandwidth and just might make you a new friend or three :wink:
Lemme make an analogy:
When I go to a restaurant, I typically want a good steak.
OK, I know this is OT, but I just have to ask. Does that means that sometimes you go to a restaurant with the express intent of having either a totally burned steak or one that is fresh from the feezer? Just want to know what to expect if we ever meet and go to dinner :biggrin::tongue:
Not really. Rewind back to the film era. Back then, whether you did your own darkroom work or not, you called what came out of the process, as a print, a photograph, didn't you? And then you also took the credit, as the photographer.
However, by your absurd standard, if you didn't do your own darkroom, you shouldn't be called a real photographer, because either a machine or some guy in a lab retouched your (potentially) technically flawed image, and the output was nothing like what you actually captured when you clicked the shutter, but something much better with colors well balanced and a good tonal distribution, things that could/would often be out of whack when left to the photographer alone...
Philippe, let me take this one step further. Let us not forget that SOOC is some fellow at Nikon, for Nikon shooters of course, who decided how the interpretation of the data would be done. I think that mr. pforsell makes this very obvious in his post.
Where to draw the straight out of camera line?
Here is a snapshot, 100% crop really straight out of camera:
- no demosaic
- no white balance
- no gamma curve
- no contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness
So, how do you assess my photographic abilities?
Oh, so VERY wicked, and true to the point, see my comment above. Great example. What did you use to grab these bits?
This argument comes up every year or two. I am really curious to those of you who talk about SOOC as to what you think a photographer like Ansel Adams would do if he had the tools we have today? My guess is that the only thing that would change would be that he wouldn't deal with smelly chemistry, but that his vision would still be primary, with him manipulating what was needed for the print. Does that make him a photographer, an artist, both, a fraud? I think we get too hung up on these issues, and then folks get emotionally involved in "defending" themselves.
Perhaps, as I noted above, rather than try to "force" people to do things one way or another, we should simply be polite and ask.
Oh, before someone jumps on me for this one, I most certainly believe that reportage and documentary purposes demand a far greater adherence to "reality", without any doubt at all.