Someone posed an interesting question to me the other day. He asked me at what point a photograph is no longer “real”. At what point does the photograph not represent what you saw when you pressed the shutter? This has been debated over and over and talked about everywhere. So I’ll present it here again. At what point is your photograph no longer real? Is it no longer real the moment you load it into Photoshop, or is there a certain invisible line that exists separating real from fake? Once you cross this line you can no longer describe your image as a photograph but rather you have to advertise it as a composite or an illustration. Are curves, levels, hues, and saturation okay but not masking, deleting, cloning, or spot healing? There was a (now) famous image released by Iran showing a missile launch adding an extra missile to the image to cover up the apparent “dud”.

Photo courtesy of middleeastinfo.org

This photo was obviously fake. They added a missile where there wasn’t one previously. However, there were missiles going off at the time the picture was taken.. How about the image at the top of the post? The picture of the train? In all truth it’s real. It’s actually how the image came out of the camera. The train was converted to black and white while the sky was left with color, but nothing was added, and nothing was removed.

What about HDR? Oh boy… There is a growing sub culture of HDR shooters, and there are people on each side of the line. For those that don’t know, an HDR takes multiple (between 3-9) bracketed shots and combines them to take advantage of the best highlights and the best shadows. Many people say that this isn’t real. I have to agree. There is no way for your camera to capture that dynamic range. Most camera’s have a dynamic range of about 5 stops. When you create an HDR you are (sometimes) doubling that. Does this mean that I “poo-poo” HDR? Absolutely not! As a matter of fact, I do HDR all of the time. Here is one from last year’s World Wide Photo Walk

What it really comes down to is disclosure. For me if I don’t remove or add anything to the image, it’s real. No disclosure required. If however I add, remove or otherwise manipulate the image to look different than it looked when I photographed it, I disclose those alterations. When you receive an image from Jason Lykins Photography, you know the truth about that image. Jason