Fabricated Weather Pics Published?

[Hank Schyma]

I recently visited a bookstore and was amazed / slightly annoyed at all the fabricated weather photos in the "nature" section.

The first I noticed was on the cover of Weather, A Visual Guide where a dual branched CG strikes a poorly pasted light-scape. The book claims to be a "Comprehensive visual guide to Weather in all manifestations." Apparently including ones that manifest in photoshop as well.

The second i noticed flipping through Extraordinary Clouds by Richard Hamblin, where a CG was very poorly pasted next to a red-dust tornado. On this one they were'nt even trying to make it look real. Underneath the title reads "Skies of the Unexpected"... They were right!

I looked on and found several other manifestations or manipulated events from some professional chasers (who i'll leave annonymous). Events that i witnessed and photographed at the same time but had much different results. Some photographers confessed their creations in subtitles and others didnt.

So, are we spending too much time chasing and punching when we should be splicing, cutting, pasting and merging???

 

[Chris Hayes]

I dont know if it was taht book, or another but I saw a weather book with a lot of obvious photoshopping. Needless to say I had no interest in buying it.

 

[Benjamin Rock]

I went to Barnes and Noble the other day and saw a book on tornadoes. I about threw the book in the recycling bin when I saw a very famous tornado that has been very famously photoshopped with an oil rig in front of it(yeah, that one)and the caption read "Terror at night, imagine what the photographer thought when he saw this." I also saw some other storms that I personally witnessed other chasers I know take pics of, claimed by other photogs or anonymous.. I mean, yeah it's possible that the guy snapping away is on the same storm, at the same moment, a few feet away, but don't claim other people's work as your own then put it under Anonymous... Seriously..

 

[Joshua Nall]

I was just recently looking at a book my parents purchased, a really nice book of photographs, and the section on weather had one shot in particular of a distant thunderstorm and all five lightning bolts were slightly different shade.. pink, red, orange, yellow, green. It was a dramatic shot, anyone would agree just looking at it, but it just annoyed me. I said something about it to them and they said that it was such an interesting photo, but they did wonder how all of them would have been different colors. It's dishonest to me because the average person wouldn't know it was a manipulated shot.... the other photos in the book were not so overdone.

I used to like seeing the photos with a sign in the shot... you know of a tornado crossing a road with a sign in the foreground that said "DANGEROUS INTERSECTION" or something... Anymore, I can't enjoy shots like that because it just makes me wonder... Is that real. If it's not real, it just annoys me. I don't care how interesting or dramatic it looks.

Folks that photoshop to the extreme, also take something from those that actually work terribly hard to get shots like that... unless of course they make it plane that the picture they are presenting is some nice artwork they did on the computer and not a photograph.

I guess you can get real picky with it, but I personally don't mind slight sharpening, and other slight adjustments, but for example, clouds that are way oversharpened, they have a dramatic look to them, and it definitely makes for an interesting photo, but it's not photography... it's art.

 

[Joshua Nall]

I realize I'm just airing my opinion, but I thought of a good example.... I consider my avatar to be art.... it is sharpened and the contrast is up, colors are saturated so it would show up better in a small photo... but I would not present this photo as being true to life. This is the true to life photo with very slight adjustments:

 

[Scott Weberpal]

I realize I'm just airing my opinion, but I thought of a good example.... I consider my avatar to be art.... it is sharpened and the contrast is up, colors are saturated so it would show up better in a small photo... but I would not present this photo as being true to life. This is the true to life photo with very slight adjustments:

I don't think anyone is questioning contrast, saturation, etc. Virtually every chase photographer enhances their images in one way or another with photoshop or another program. What's in question is actually changing what is in the image - copying and pasting lightning from a different image, or adding other physical objects that weren't there originally. Almost every nature photo you see in any book is going to be enhanced, just not faked to show an object which physically wasn't there when the photo was taken.

 

[Hank Schyma]

"all five lightning bolts were slightly different shade.. pink, red, orange, yellow, green. It was a dramatic shot, anyone would agree just looking at it, but it just annoyed me"

Hey Joshua, I'd say cut that one some slack... Warren Faidley has done that a few times by changing color filters during the long exposure. To me it's a legit / artistic effect... Clever too. It helps seperate bolts and puts them in a sort of chronological order.

Also dont sweat the contrast either... Seems I'm always having to toy with images to make them appear as my eye saw it.

 

[Jared Farrer]

I also get annoyed by this, and when books use images of fake (animated) tornadoes, it really peaves me! Especially when the information they are trying to convey is of a true and important nature!

Their called tornado illustrations. And I am not knocking the people who sell them at all. But the books that use them. Im not sure why, maybe cheaper not sure. I know most people wont know the difference, but that doesnt make it right! And most I see dont even list that its a representation? Just gets on my nerves.

 

[James Langford]

"all five lightning bolts were slightly different shade.. pink, red, orange, yellow, green. It was a dramatic shot, anyone would agree just looking at it, but it just annoyed me"

Hey Joshua, I'd say cut that one some slack... Warren Faidley has done that a few times by changing color filters during the long exposure. To me it's a legit / artistic effect... Clever too. It helps seperate bolts and puts them in a sort of chronological order.

Yeah, I've seen that one too, and I'd say it's legit. The one I'm thinking of is from film, and the photographer repeatedly shot over the same piece of film, changing the filter each time. I think at one point he even used an IR filter? Pretty neat stuff!

James

 

[Shane Adams]

All photography is art IMO, because it's all manipulated to some degree after the shot is taken. To me, a photo is what you get when you snap the picture, and you're done. If the saturation/contrast/color/etc etc isn't to your liking, well that's what Nature gave you. Adjusting Nature artificially IMO turns a photo into a painting.

 

[Mike Deep]

All photography is art IMO, because it's all manipulated to some degree after the shot is taken. To me, a photo is what you get when you snap the picture, and you're done. If the saturation/contrast/color/etc etc isn't to your liking, well that's what Nature gave you. Adjusting Nature artificially IMO turns a photo into a painting.

It's not really that simple though. When you shoot with a digital camera those adjustments are applied one way or another. If you don't pick them yourself, your camera does.

When you shoot with a DSLR the default output is flat and does not match the original scene. That's intentional because you're expected to adjust color balance, saturation, contrast, and sharpness in post yourself.

What do you do when your camera's AWB decides the light source was something wild like 3000K when it was really just daylight? That definitely wasn't the original scene.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I see Photoshop as an extension of the camera's exposure controls, especially the functions of any RAW converter. Most anything that Photoshop/RAW controls can do that could have been done within the camera is ok with me.

From a journalism standpoint, you get into problems when you take totally different images and merge them together to create a scene that didn't happen, such as taking a lightning shot from the middle of nowhere in the Plains and placing it behind a city or a landmark that wasn't in the original scene. Stacking can get into a gray area if the merged images were not taken in the same photo session (IE a lightning/city composite taken on different dates).

As far as what would sell a print or be otherwise pleasing to a viewer - as long as it's disclosed in the description of the image, anything goes! Art is not constrained by the principles of journalism - if people like the final image created from a Plains lightning shot behind New York City, and your description of the image says so (doesn't try to pass it off as real), I don't see the problem. I personally would never do that pre-sale, but to each their own.

In my opinion, the list of acceptable photo manipulations are:

1.) RAW exposure controls - basically an extension of the camera's exposure controls.

2.) Stitching multiple images into a panorama

3.) HDR compositing

4.) Cloning out sensor dust spots

I will say this - I know of instances where a photo license client will actually request manipulation of an image, such as removing power lines or other distractions before publication or display. As long as the end user knows how the image was created, and it meets their specs for how they want to use it, you've accomplished something with the final result. Some of those book images, annoying as they may be to you and me, may have been the publisher's doing rather than the photographer.

 

[Greg Campbell]

Any chaser knows that scoring a good photo takes LOTS of time and effort. As an occasional lightning shooter, I roam around southern Arizona searching for storms in scenic locations. This entails hours of driving, risk of electrocution, risk to camera equipment due to blowing dust and rain, rattlesnake fu (I swear, next time I feel something crawling over my foot, I'm going to ignore it!), worry of encountering border banditos, etc. My efforts are modest in comparison to people like Susan and Warren who are, AFAIK, out late nearly every night. The (just!) reward for all this effort is an occasional 'wow' picture.

I can't count the number of blatant lightningshop fakes I've seen. It's dismaying that people try to pass this garbage off as legit. While there are thousands of lighting photos out there, over time the more popular and/or spectacular bolts become recognizable. It kills me to see a known bolt pasted onto someone eles's landscape image. The losers who claim or imply ownership never even left the driveway. Grrr! Anyone who's driven across 3 midwest states only to arrive at a blue-sky bust will likely find the whole cut-and-paste mentality wildly disrespectful to those who have invested the time and effort to take legitimate photographs.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

All photography is art IMO, because it's all manipulated to some degree after the shot is taken. To me, a photo is what you get when you snap the picture, and you're done. If the saturation/contrast/color/etc etc isn't to your liking, well that's what Nature gave you. Adjusting Nature artificially IMO turns a photo into a painting.

This is a very defensible philosophy, but it runs into the problem of "what you get when you snap the picture". Different cameras with different processing algorithms (all cameras have sensor->JPEG processing algorithms designed to punch up images, some more than others) will produce different images. Different cameras with different sensors will produce different images. Different lenses will produce different images. Different monitors with different color balances and differing dynamic ranges will produce different results. Different films will produce different results, as will different processing methods. Different printing methods will produce different results, as will different scanning methods. Different camera settings will create different images. All of these will be different than what your eye sees, because your eye does not share your camera's hardware and software, it has it's own (far superior) hardware and software. Our eyes do not experience lens flare nor do they experience rectilinear distortion. Our foreheads do not fire a flash when it gets dark.

Essentially, if what you get when you snap the picture is left up to a set of controllable variables that you do not consider, does this make the picture more "real" than if what you get when you snap the picture is left up to a set of controllable variables that you DO consider? I would argue that it does not; the two things are not related. No photograph is real, but a smart photographer can create an image that reminds a viewer of reality in such a way that it seems real.

BTW, I would not argue that it is acceptible to photoshop in lightning strikes. Once you start doing that, the image is no longer a photograph, in my opinion, and rather a photo illustration (which is basically a wholly manufactured piece of artwork that just happens to contain some photographic elements.)

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

ST needs a "groundhog's day" section. This topic could go in there along with lightbars, chaser safety, etc etc etc. Each year they make a bit less sense to bother with lol.