Vegas, September 2005: I’m newly married and on the first leg of our honeymoon tour.  The Canon 350D is very new in my hands and I’m still trying to understand why I would ever bother shooting RAW images.  After living for five years in New York City, the New York, New York casino at the bottom of the strip fascinates me to no end.  A completely generic version of one of the greatest cities in the world, complete with a mini skyline and a scale model of the Statue of Liberty.  

This is the first picture in my three part analysis of my minor photographic successes.  Unique in the three, this photo is an example of a shot that was completely created during the post production process and has essentially no artistic value in its original form.

This is where I come into conflict with the concept of factual integrity as it relates to post-production in photography.  I understand that in photojournalism there is a direct need for honesty within the frame.  When a photojournalist documents a situation, a person or an event, any manipulation of the pixels must be limited to the basic requirements for correct display.  Anything more can be misconstrued as an attempt to mislead the audience.  I can even understand the reluctance to sharpen a picture, as that could theoretically introduce visual data that was not actually present at the time of capture.  But all that being considererd, the factual integrity inherrent to photojournalism has somehow been misappropriated to apply to all documentary photography as if it is a standard of practice.  

There is a notion that any photoshop work done on a photograph instantly recatagorizes a “photo” as instead an “illustration” due to the electronic artistic intervention employed by the photographer.  These latent luddites would even suggest a simple black or white border to be heresy.

For those people, this image of the vegas’d version of the Statue of Liberty would be the ultimate quagmire.  All that you see in the final work is actually contained within the original capture, yet without the techniques I used in stumbling towards the final creation, none of those indivudal details could have coexisted within the same final frame.  

To the side, we see the original frame, and how it was exposed for the sky instead of the subject.  It was only through a series of processes and layers that I was able to split out the foreground elements and background elements in order to create the optimal range of tones for both.  By using an adjustment I almost never use, “Equalize”, I was able to draw out an increase of detail and color saturation from the foreground statue.  This process left the background completely over exposed and flat, so I was forced to separate the foreground and background elements into two different images and then recombine them with some layer masking in order to achieve the optimal contrast for each color tone.

The end result is something akin to an HDR photograph, albeit one created in the post production process.  The background was optimized for the full range of cloud and sky tones while the foreground could spread the entire range of tones within the same frame.  The fact that this range of tonality was all included within the original JPG compressed capture is truly a testament to the processing power of the 350D camera.

It is a shot that was an instant hit when finished, however there were always people who questioned the methods used to achieve the final result.  The luddite crowd, perhaps woefully unschooled on classical darkroom techniques, believe that any form of photo editing is a copout.  They don’t understand that “burning and dodging” are not inventions by Adobe, and so they dismiss a photo like this as a distortion of reality.

For me, it is a perplexing example of photography because it is an image that was not created in the camera, but was essentially created in the electronic darkroom.  Having little confidence of my own artistic vision when out in the field, it becomes particularly vexing to prove that a throw-away image can become one of my most popular shots with just a few simple photoshop steps.  It becomes difficult to claim any authorship of the final product when so much of it is created after the shutter has snapped shut.

I suppose the truth is never as important as how you present it.