I had a note from a friend yesterday pointing out an article he'd been quoted in. It was a story in the New York Times on the overwhelming use of Photoshop in family photos. It made me wonder where we're headed photographically.

I started working with Photoshop in the 1980s to scan film into computers. We'd crop and adjust luminance (lighter or darker), add or remove contrast and occasionally lighten a person's face or darken another area of the image. The guidelines for what we could do were simple - no more than we were allowed to do in the darkroom. And the important word there is "allowed." The results were like that of the man getting a shave - nothing added, nothing removed.
In earlier decades photojournalism struggled with the ethics of photo manipulation. As late as the 1960s removing a person or an object from a photo was still considered okay at some papers. But that attitude was changing. Newspapers and their photographers realized that their reputation for honesty was on the line. New rules were introduced banning that sort of manipulation. In the 1970s and 1980s heavy burning (darkening) of parts of images was in fashion, and called "The Hand of God," shown here with my photo of a jet and the moon against a blue sky. Wow, did I really do that? That was outlawed as well.

By the late 1980s computers were starting to replace darkrooms, and Photoshop was becoming the tool to prep photos with. And then Photoshop was introduced in art departments. And that created new problems. While newspaper photographers had developed rules to try to preserve the integrity of photographs (see the National Press Photographer's Association ethics guidelines (http://www.nppa.org/professional_development/business_practices/ethics.html)), art departments worked under different rules. Their job was to create art, and Photoshop made it much easier to do that realistically. Now it was the newspapers' turn to develop ethics rules for the art departments. Thus the use of the tagline, "Illustration by..." to distinguish created images from real ones.

Newspapers tackled how Photoshop was being used early on, and created guidelines for what was and wasn't allowed. They had to do this to protect their reputations as a trusted new source.

Now Photoshop, and the much less expensive Elements, have become daily tools in many people's lives. And that's led to an amazing amount of photo manipulation. Penguins and Polar Bears together? They live on opposite sides of the world! Photoshop has even been turned into a verb in our language, with "has that been photoshopped?" heard over and over.

Here's my complaint - Photoshop is WAY overused, and actually changing photography. What's wrong with simply making a good photo? That's where the real art and craft of photography are. Photoshop's a great tool, and I've seen some truly amazing illustrations created with it. You can find examples across the web. It's not, though, a replacement for photographic skill and knowledge. There are an endless number of workshops to teach Photoshop, and they wow you with how to take a crappy picture and make it look good. If you truly want to be a photographer, wouldn't your time be better spent learning to make good pictures?

One of the discussions I have with friends is whether we're becoming photographic dinosaurs, where capturing a special image is our goal, not creating it on the computer. I don't think where we're going with this is a good thing.

So this is what I ask - spend more time behind the camera, and less behind the computer. Develop your photographic skills. Learn to control your camera. To me there's no greater pleasure than finding and making a beautiful picture. Make art with your camera. And that's what photography's really about.