Photography versus Illustration and Painting

I know people who now make magnificient pictures.

Who really makes those pictures ?

 

The highly sophisticated camera ? Photoshop ? The person behing the viewfinder ?

Oh yes, they are really very nice shots !

I have an old camera which doesn’t allow me to take pictures like people can make pictures nowadays because I just haven’t got an updated camera. However, I just updated my use of Photoshop… after 10 years being un-updated ! What a blast ! Love it at first sight.

I have been studying and looking into cameras lately for my own business including video and I very much think of a very close person who was a photographer then Lab Director at the National Geographic. He stopped making shots when he saw that anybody could make ultra-sophisticated photography thanks mainly to highly sophisticated cameras and star-system software Photoshop. And I fully understand his philosophy.

As said above, I have subscribed to the most recent Photoshop (which I hadn’t for 10 years!) and the progress is spectacular. I started using Photoshop in 1998 and it has nothing to do with today’s Photoshop with all the latest HDR, panoramic, filters, characteristics, etc... You can almost make pictures without having anybody behind the viewfinder (ah ah – no, not yet, but...).

If you look at the pictures done by some photographers, some use HDR technique included automatically in the camera. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range which means the cell of the camera is going to capture much more information than a human eye can and thus creates some sort of magical unreal pictures. The first time this technique was used in the movies was in the movie “The Lord of the Ring”. It is basically simple as the very sophisticated cells captures low, medium and high light, that is to say an extra wide range of light, more than what the cells of our eyes are able to capture. Not only that, the camera has a computer which processes and combines to release a “perfect” unreal picture.

Nowadays, anybody with a good budget can buy a high quality camera together with using Photoshop for after-process.

That is one reason why I really like much more being in the illustration business because, we still remain with a blank piece of paper and a pencil and create from scratch most of the time – even if using the digital world.

When you are in the business you can easily see how people use the digital world more than their own creative skills. They usually think they are very good while their eyes are not yet much experienced. I have therefore one quote : “never let the machine overcome your own work and creation”. That is also why I mostly like poetry and illustration or cartooning which are part of the literary world, don’t reveal the whole containt, let your imagination do the rest, let their imagination do the rest.

Having a good camera and a good software to process picture is exciting but the road that leads you to your own creation, to your very own style is way long ahead right at the end of the path you can barely imagine and before you get to it – if ever you get to it, never lose the sense of the miraculous and of your creation skills, don’t let yourself absorbed by the machine which is only a tool and nothing more.

 
Let’s not make things to easy ! Let’s keep a piece of dream and our world will be just perfect.

©2017 Carol Scown-Raynal, author of this article published on http://scownillustration.blogspot.fr/