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Is filtering the photo to turn a day shot into a night shot “fake” under your definition? It’s only using the light which exists in a single shot, so it’s not

Is filtering the photo to turn a day shot into a night shot “fake” under your definition? It’s only using the light which exists in a single shot, so it’s not by a literal reading; yet it creates a scene which distinctly never happened, eg a certain person in a park at night. I think many people view color alterations — creating “better than real” shots — to be a similar kind of non-reality, and for those people it would be perfectly apt to call modified photos “fake”: they don’t capture the reality of anything, but are instead an imagined work — how the photographer wishes the scene looked.

goblin89 8y ago
‘Fake’ is something I could see myself using for an ostensibly documentary[0] photograph manipulated in a way that changes the moment to something no one ever perceived. A polarizing filter under right conditions can turn sky at noon into very dark shades of blue. UV pass filters let us produce landscapes that are wholly surreal with black skies and white trees. Long exposures capture light trails and rivers of light that no one sees. As to less extreme “better than real” cases, the light we see results in unique experience affected by countless factors, importantly including our preceding experiences. If a picture seems “better than real” (or better than straight out of a typical camera on default settings), perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like. If it generally causes a negative reaction, perhaps it’s because the creator attempted to bite off more than they could chew in this sense. I can sympathize with distaste for certain kinds of aesthetics (for example, I might not enjoy the average look of UV or astrophotography, and I know a person or two with just generic aversion to perceived post-processing), but for me it’s about careful choice of the word and whether I can enjoy the resulting look. [0] Something that appears documentary at first might turn out to be another form of art. Whether there is purposeful misrepresentation goes beyond purely the appearance of the work, and is not black and white. It’s possible to capture a shot that uses none of pre- or post-processing, yet is misleading in a major way due to framing and context in which the picture appears.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  > If the result seems “better than real”, perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like at the moment I don’t object to impressionistic photography as an art form — but it’s not converting anything real, in the same way an impressionist painting of a tree doesn’t. It’s a fake scene by which the artist can convey the impression of emotions. It’s not about aesthetics — a “fake” photo can be of exceeding aesthetic value — but rather, about if it conveys something accurate about the world. It’s also not about if it conveys content we otherwise might not have known, there’s whole fields of study on that topic. Impressionist photos can quite reasonably be called “fake”, even those with merely surreal colors on literal geometric structure — because they fail to convey the world as it is, and are merely an artistic creation.
  - goblin89 8y ago
    Such a picture might convey something accurate about someone’s perception, which may or may not be seen as valuable and may or may not be close to some sort of consensus. A map is not the territory[0]; the map is not even of the world but merely of perception of it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#"A_map_is_not_the_territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#"A_map_... Addendum: no, I would never call a non-documentary work of any kind ‘fake’, the word conveys nothing of substance yet has the potential to discourage further creative work, which I would like to avoid. Depending on what it is, I might say ‘surreal’, for example. To each their own.

goblin89 8y ago

‘Fake’ is something I could see myself using for an ostensibly documentary[0] photograph manipulated in a way that changes the moment to something no one ever perceived. A polarizing filter under right conditions can turn sky at noon into very dark shades of blue. UV pass filters let us produce landscapes that are wholly surreal with black skies and white trees. Long exposures capture light trails and rivers of light that no one sees. As to less extreme “better than real” cases, the light we see results in unique experience affected by countless factors, importantly including our preceding experiences. If a picture seems “better than real” (or better than straight out of a typical camera on default settings), perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like. If it generally causes a negative reaction, perhaps it’s because the creator attempted to bite off more than they could chew in this sense. I can sympathize with distaste for certain kinds of aesthetics (for example, I might not enjoy the average look of UV or astrophotography, and I know a person or two with just generic aversion to perceived post-processing), but for me it’s about careful choice of the word and whether I can enjoy the resulting look. [0] Something that appears documentary at first might turn out to be another form of art. Whether there is purposeful misrepresentation goes beyond purely the appearance of the work, and is not black and white. It’s possible to capture a shot that uses none of pre- or post-processing, yet is misleading in a major way due to framing and context in which the picture appears.

FakeComments 8y ago
> If the result seems “better than real”, perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like at the moment I don’t object to impressionistic photography as an art form — but it’s not converting anything real, in the same way an impressionist painting of a tree doesn’t. It’s a fake scene by which the artist can convey the impression of emotions. It’s not about aesthetics — a “fake” photo can be of exceeding aesthetic value — but rather, about if it conveys something accurate about the world. It’s also not about if it conveys content we otherwise might not have known, there’s whole fields of study on that topic. Impressionist photos can quite reasonably be called “fake”, even those with merely surreal colors on literal geometric structure — because they fail to convey the world as it is, and are merely an artistic creation.
- goblin89 8y ago
  Such a picture might convey something accurate about someone’s perception, which may or may not be seen as valuable and may or may not be close to some sort of consensus. A map is not the territory[0]; the map is not even of the world but merely of perception of it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#"A_map_is_not_the_territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#"A_map_... Addendum: no, I would never call a non-documentary work of any kind ‘fake’, the word conveys nothing of substance yet has the potential to discourage further creative work, which I would like to avoid. Depending on what it is, I might say ‘surreal’, for example. To each their own.