A Distorted Reality.

There are certain things in my browsing of the photography of others on sites such as Flickr which annoy me no end: whether it just be things stemming from bad taste, or the use of effects so pointlessly overused to a point beyond mere cliché; there’s practically always something bound to irk me on my travels. In light of this, here’s my list of my greatest ‘don’t’s for photography.

1) Vignetting.

Vignetting example (from Wiki Commons)

This, frankly, never works. The ‘point’, if it can be stated as such, is supposedly to draw attention to the subject by darkening the outer areas of the image. Surely, I can’t be the only person to find this approach cheap? If you need to accentuate the subject in such a manner, it’s really not a suitable thing to be taking photographs of, surely? This is an edit which can only be used in an attempt to salvage a bad photograph, if it’s not being used purely because you saw somebody else do it and it ‘looked cool.’

Apparently, some use it because of the ‘vintage’ or ‘timeless’ (what does that word even mean, anyway?) feel that it is supposed to give. Personally, I can’t see why people would want this: the vignette is a throwback to the days of poor lens manufacture more than anything else, and only really occurs naturally in modern equipment if a lens hood too large for a wide-angle lens is used.

Leave the past which deserves to be such there.

2) Rounded Corners.

Rounded Corners Example (from Flickr somewhere)

This, I flat out do not understand: here is an increasing popular ‘effect’ which brings absolutely nothing of value to the image. I don’t even think it to be an aesthetically pleasing ‘addition’, and, if anything, little more than a distraction from the subject of the photograph, mired in a sea of hipster ‘photographers’ (read: kids with Daddy’s 350D) keen to reach the highest accolade available to them: DeviantArt’s ‘popular’ pages. I think it’s an attempted emulation of the way in which the edges of photographs do wear away from a point over time, but in digital such an intent seems almost philistine: once again; this is a sort of equipment malfunction which shouldn’t occur (or be emulated) in this day and age. Maybe I’m too much of a sucker for the rectangular 3:2 ratio photographs which full-frame dSLRs and 35mm gives.

3) Incorrect White Balance.

Example of incorrect white balance, from cambridgeincolour.com's White Balance Tutorial

Excepting, of course, sunrises/sunsets and the like which are integrally not white balanced, there’s no excuse for the colour balance of a digitally recorded photograph being wrong: it’s a three-click fix in Photoshop, and it’s just such an error of either laziness or ignorance that it never fails to annoy me.

What’s worse for me is when it’s clear to see that the white balance has been altered in order to (as the artist would like to think) convey a mood; taking a shift towards blue hues to present a ‘cold’ atmosphere being an obvious example. This is such a specious move, once again, which is endemic of a lack of creativity: if the mood of a photograph is to be cold, the subject matter alone should be able to convey this. The industrial, the run-down, subdued light, visibly sad human subjects: these things would provide a far better method of showing cold moods than the clichéd colour shift.

4) Horrible Borders

Hellsinki by *CuriousCorn (found at DeviantART)

I love the photograph to the right; I really do: it’s a photograph of a non-stereotypical sunset over the beauty that is Helsinki with tasteful HDR, but I can’t help but be repulsed by the simple repugnant border than the photographer (*CuriousCorn of DeviantArt) has decided to apply. From his portfolio, it’s a mistake he makes time and time again: the border is far too think and the font chosen not nearly subtle enough. The 1/2 pixel orange border seems to make the image seem less striking: the colour in the photograph is subtracted from by this addition.

5) Excessive Use of Photoshop Texture Filters

Something from the Flickr 'Photoshop is not a Dirty Word' pool.

There’s a point when photography ends and digital art begins: since the proliferation of Photoshop into the hands of those who really wouldn’t be able to legitimately afford it, this line seems to be ignored. There comes a point when you abstract an image from its original state so greatly that it ceases to be what it originally was. Overlaying two images on top of one another is a conventional, age-old darkroom trick, and one which can provide results which would otherwise be nigh-on impossible to recreate – this I have no issue with, and I like to explore myself. But when other elements (such as heavy brushing) become involved, most of the work is being done in post-process, and not by the combination of camera and photographer.

Annoying why? Purely because they define this art as photography and I’m a pedant.

6) Bad HDR.

Awful HDR from Flickr somewhere.

There’s a time and a place for HDR. The shame is, many people are not aware of when and where it’s really going to work and how to pull it off right. When done wrong, it just looks horrid; and makes everything look unrealistic and even sickly with saturation of colour. It’s so heinously cartoony in its worst incarnations. People have this seemingly insatiable inclination to apply HDR tonemapping techniques to images which do not have much in the way of Dynamic Range to begin with: it’s a recipe for disaster.

The long and short of this article? Photoshop is the devil in the wrong hands.