All About Exposure Control

Q&A: Are Digital Photos Phony?

I'm new to digital photography, but have been interested in photography for many years. I'm not comfortable with the idea of people doctoring a digital image to achieve a spectacular picture--it is not the real scene. Your recent Hot Pic of the Month (the mask photo) is a fake. The great photographers in the past were honored because they were in the right place at the right time. They didn't make the photo in the dark room.

--Jack Henderson, Waretown, New Jersey

You raise a great point, Jack. Is digital photography less valid because images can be--and often are--doctored in some way?

Not by a long shot. Consider traditional photography. Most photographers--certainly the great ones--who shoot with film are not simply "in the right place at the right time." They edit their photos in the dark room, sometimes rather extensively. Dodging and burning, which selectively changes the exposure of certain parts of the photo, is but a single example of how traditional photographers capture the images they do. They also crop their photos to deliver the best composition, and in some cases even physically manipulate the scene itself before pressing the shutter release. More than once I've read about a famous photographer who moved some branches in a landscape to frame the shot perfectly.

Of course, there's the film itself. There are dozens of kinds on the market. Why? Because various types of film have specific characteristics that photographers want for different situations. Some produce vivid, in-your-face colors. Others capture more subdued hues. Which type of film produces "real" photos? Neither, because no camera ever captures the same scene that your eyes see. Likewise, the lens has a dramatic effect on the final photo. A telephoto lens creates an artificial compression effect, pushing the foreground and background close together. A wide-angle lens used for the same scene would capture something dramatically different. Is one image more real than the other? Nope, they're just different artistic interpretations of the same scene.

Certainly, few things done by traditional photographers are quite as explicit as adding eyes to a mask, but when you acknowledge that photography is an art form--not an antiseptic method of representing reality--you'll see it's little more than an evolution of the traditional photo techniques that have been used for over a hundred years.