I'm Tired Of Looking At Poor Photographs; How About You?

Here is one of my own images edited, for example, in a fashion that doesn't reflect any
sort of reality on this planet!  But these types of images are now found everywhere.
(click to enlarge)

I don't know about you, but I am really tired of looking at poor photographs and terrible video on the web, on television news, in magazines, newspapers, on social media, etc. These images and videos are now everywhere.  Each year it seems as though bad pictures and horrendous videos far outnumber the quality ones.

When I speak of poor photographs, I'm speaking of ones that are somewhat out of focus whether due to camera movement or lack of proper focusing, have horizons that are not straight, are over-saturated, too contrasty, either over-sharpened or not sharpened enough, have dust spots and maybe even the white balance is so far off that they look like something out of a B movie.

Another type of image of which I tired are the absolutely gorgeous, high impact, visually stunning landscape photographs.  The reason why I have tired of them is because everyone, it seems, is manipulating nature so much that these types of images don't reflect reality in any way.  You know the ones.  They are everywhere.  They are stunning. The light looks magical, the colors are intense and the dynamic range approaches 20 stops!  Gorgeous, but since everyone around the world is using their technology to edit reality, I find them now boring and old.  They, too, are everywhere.  When first photographers started posting these gorgeous images, they got my attention.  But the more I see them, the more they bore me since it is the technology, not the vision, that created them.

In all honesty, I'm guilty of sending out a few of those images a few years back.  I,too, was bitten by the siren song of unreal photo manipulation of nature.  But, I think I've come back to reality.

I would never, ever think of posting or sending out images that haven't been adjusted in one way or another to correct the types of issues I mention above.  With all of the apps available on every type of mobile phone platform, there really isn't a good excuse for sending out bad images.  Think of what it says about the photographer.  The questions I ask myself are, "does the photographer understand what he/she is doing?" "Does the photographer even care about his/her work?"  What kind of pride does this photographer have to send out work so poor?"  You get my drift.

Here is another example that would be typical of poor images sent out for everyone to see!  Ughh! (click to enlarge)
It is really straightforward and takes almost no time to straighten the horizon, adjust the white balance and
increase the contrast to make this image look a lot better before sending it out in your name.

There is a prominent photographic magazine in the United States that is centered around nature photography.  Overall, the magazine provides some good information and shows some outstanding work by a variety of known and unknown photographers.  But I did not renew my subscription. Why? Because the images they consistently display are so far from reality in color, saturation and dynamic range, that many look like photo-illustrations rather than photographs.  I know and acknowledge that some people love photographs that look like these, otherwise the magazine would go out of business.  But I have been all over the United States several times, in all kinds of weather through all four seasons, and I have never seen nature look like what is portrayed in this particular magazine.  The images are so far from reality that I have totally lost interest in looking at them.

I have been seriously photographing now for 45 years and I am mostly self-taught.  I learned photography long before the Internet was invented and I learned it by buying every book I could find about photography, talking to and listening to photographers and learning what a good photograph looks like by looking at thousands and thousands of them.  I'm afraid if someone were to look at the majority of images posted today, they wouldn't learn much about what a good image looks like.  That is a shame, in my opinion.

Television is especially bad about displaying images and videos captured by witnesses to specific news stories.  Its too bad that television news operations have gotten so cheap by terminating the employment of their crews (putting people out of work unnecessarily just to make more money), that they instead use crowd-sources images to illustrate stories. Personally, I would rather just have a well written description of an event than to see skewed and out-of-focus video, badly made photographs, etc.  Think about how a wonderfully written novel can generate images in your mind's eye.  I think the bad images degrade the importance of the story itself.  Newspapers and magazines are wholesale firing their photographers as well and I think the trend will backfire terribly in time.

It doesn't take much time to perform a few simple edits, whether on your mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer before sending out something that represents you, your skill level, your vision and mostly the pride you have in your work and your accomplishments.  Here is all you need to do for the vast majority of your images:

a)  straighten the horizon, literally or figuratively

b)  adjust brightness (luminance)

c)  color correct so your image is close to looking as it should.  You don't have to be perfect and you can always leave room for your "interpretation" of a scene.

d)  adjust contrast

e)  adjust saturation.  Don't oversaturate to the point that the image looks like a frame from an animated movie

f)  sharpen your image

g)  lastly, if your image is out of focus, don't send it out.  You are only as good as the worst image you show.

The images you send out or display are a direct reflection of you.  Are you proud of what the image says about you?  If not, choose another that reflects your skills and pride.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


All content on this blog is © 2013-2015 Dennis A. Mook.  All Rights Reserved.  Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution.  Permission may be granted for commercial use.  Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.