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“We got tired of the sameness of the exquisiteness of the photograph . . . [referring to the exact rendition of detail which is all-revealing.] Why? Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. Now, however hard-headed a man may be, he cannot stand too many facts; it is easy to get a surfeit of realities, and he wants a little mystification as a relief...” ~ Henry Peach Robinson
SINCE MY FIRST MAKING OF A PHOTOGRAPH WITH THE use of a digital camera, I have been applying-during processing-vignetting to my pictures. Recently I have also been making pictures using the iPhone PORTRAIT setting in order to achieve a limited DOF. From time to time, a slight hint of overall Gaussian Blur makes an appearance in my pictures. And, overall color saturation reduction is a regular part of my image file processing.
My rationale for these post-click-of-the-shutter processing steps is predicated on my dislike of the ever-increasing-let’s call it what it is-fetish for ultra realism. That is, iMo, the quest for maximun sharpness / resolution / detail together with extreme dynamic range, micro contrast, and color saturation that give us those nice bright colors, give us the greens of summers and makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.
Some might opine that I am wallowing in a nostalgia for the good ol' days of color film cuz, I must confess, to a certain extent I want the look and feel of my pictures to resemble the look and feel of a color C print made from color negative film. However, I want that look and feel, not cuz it mimics the analog look and feel but cuz, to my eye and sensibilities, I just flat out do not like the look and feel of the hyper-realism so evident in the current picture making environment.
In today’s digital picture making domain, iMo (and to my eye and sensibilities), so many pictures contain “too many facts”, aka: too much information (TMI). Or, if you will, a “surfeit of realities”. I would go so far as to suggest that the surfeit of realities found in hyper-real photographs far exceeds what the human eye-with a fixed glance-can see when viewing the same scene in situ. These pictures are, to a certain extent (to my eye and sensibilities), rather “clinical”. That is, while they present a surfeit of facts, they have a rather distinct lack of mystification.
ASIDE To be certain, in my application of processing techniques I always attempt to respect how the depicted referent(s) appeared to my eye in situ. END ASIDE
FYI, Robinson put forth the above quote most likely between 1869>1890. One can only imagine what he might have to say re: today’s digital surfeit of realities.