I am not here to say that all filters or edits are bad, I’m here to say
that there is a time and place for them. I run an Instagram account for my
honorary and often many of the images that I post are not ones that I have
taken, so they might not have the best light, so in that case since I am
representing an organization, I take the time to not add a filter to the photo,
but to adjust the lighting a little bit in order to make the image higher
quality. I think that that is totally fine. What is also fine is if you are
looking to have a specific theme or style associated with your photo and it is
obvious that it’s a theme and not you trying to pass off a filtered photo as
the original. What really bothers me is when someone takes a photo, say of a
sunset, and it doesn’t turn out how they wanted it to because, as discussed
before, you can’t capture the aura of the sunset on camera very well. Then, say
that person goes into photo shop or adds some filters to it to make it seem
more like the “real” sunset and then they pass it off as a legit photo and even
go as far to post it and say “#nofilter” on their post, when it is obvious that
it has been tampered with. These types of things really get on my nerves. You can’t
just change something, remix it if you will, and play it off as the original.
It’s not the original. I know that others may not have the same views as I do,
but as a photographer the most annoying thing that I see on my feeds are poorly
doctored “improved” photos that look like trash because either the person didn’t
know what they were doing, or made it extremely obvious because of the lack of
skill they had when they fixed it up.
If a photo has been edited it should be
stated somewhere that it is not, in fact, the raw image. Certain images of people
can be photo shopped to put them in different situations than the image was
taken in, and we know all about how models are photo shopped in advertisements
and magazine adds. But as a society we believe what we see because it is a
photograph. I think that bringing attention to how easy it is to change a photo
is a great first step in keeping people accountable and noting on their work if
it has been altered in any way. Especially with the models. Young girls and
boys are very impressionable and they are grown up to believe that they should
be the “ideal” that our society pushes on them in magazines and advertisements.
I know that I covered a
lot of related things to photography in this essay, but I wanted to explain
some of my thoughts on the topic in general, as well as the alterations and
when they could be good or bad. A lot of the texts that we covered in class
were related to this project in some way. Photography is something that I am
truly passionate about and I am glad that this class has given me the
opportunity to voice the opinions that I haven’t been able to voice in the past
and to have some concrete resources behind them. I enjoyed being able to dive
deeper into the topic and will continue to think about these things in the
future.
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