Traveling around the world was always combined with staying on after the assignment in Africa, Australia or where-ever with a personal wildlife photographic safari…I was extremely fortunate to travel on the client’s dime! I was always also a wildlife artist with international clients, so the photography and the oil-painting were always intricately intertwined in that the finished “image” was always the paramount objective.

Both my son’s are now in the industry. One a photo-journalist. The other, the vice-president and creative and technical supervisor of a major international film studio company specializing in digital compositing for the film and TV industry which brings me full circle to the main topic of this discussion….competition rules and the need to present RAW files. It is time for the rules to be based on an honest effort to create a true and beautiful representation of what the photographer’s mind saw. As to the RAW file issue, from many discussions on the learning curve my one son acquired in the transition from film to digital in his movie compositing work and his software development, I have been made aware that in his industry, a finalized Tiff or Photoshop file of an eagle flying off with an elephant grasped firmly in it’s talons could, admittedly at some cost in time and expense, be converted in its newly altered form back to a RAW/DNG file with all history removed and the original meta-data inserted proving that by competition rules, this event actually happened!….see everyone!…its on a RAW file! With that in mind, just how long will it be before these “competitions” will need to change with the times and go back to the days when the image was truly a work of art based on the creative and technical skill of the artist/photographer. I am getting old!

The emphasis in the class is learning how to use your camera in manual and semi-automatic modes. I tell my students you can set your camera to automatic and half of the time you’ll get a decent photograph — but what about the other half? Most of my students come to class and shoot JPGs. We work hard to learn how to make good sharp exposures but afterwards the software engineers take over.

What I mean is this. If you don’t shoot RAW, the image still must be processed through the camera’s RAW converter. If you’re shooting jpgs, the camera’s built-in RAW converter will make decisions for you like sharpness, contrast, hue, saturation, and luminance. This takes control of the final result out of the photographer’s hand and relies on the software developer to come up with the correct algorithm for each situation. Even though I am a software developer, I don’t want someone else making those decisions for my photographs which is why I shoot RAW and process every image I think worthy with ACR and Photoshop. It’s not cheating; It’s me taking control and responsibility for my images. In this digital age it must be recognized that image manipulation is a necessity like film selection, developer, stop-bath, and fixer were a necessity in the film era. Thank goodness I no longer have to sit in a darkroom and breath in those chemicals.

Thanks David. I am glad that we have control of the way our images look. With slide film in a lab it was a crap shoot. I would say that what you are describing I prefer to call “image optimization” rather than “manipulation.” artie