People like to think that photographs are “real”. Because of a strange accident (mostly) of timing and history, photographs, more than movies, videos, writing, or other ways of recording the world around us, are assumed to be “true” and “objective” records. This comes, I think, mostly from their long time use as evidence and in journalism. But however we got here, it is the truth that people think that photographs should be “realistic”.
The nature of this realism is tricky to pin down. Generally, when asked about it, most people will say something like “well, the picture ought to look like something I would have seen if I was standing there”. On the face of it this sounds like a reasonable statement. But when examined and unpeeled, there is actually a lot more going on than you might think.
The tricky truth is that all photographic images are heavily manipulated. Here are all the things I am manipulating or lying about whenever I take a picture, but which most people will not notice, or will not complain about, if I do my job right:
I am manipulating the light to make it flatter the subject as much as possible. In many cases I’m taking a picture of lighting or optical effects that hardly ever happen (sunsets, rainbows, crazy reflection or diffraction effects), because they look cool.
I am using lenses, cropping, or multiple shots to frame the subject the way I want so you pay attention to what I want you to pay attention to. This includes using wide lenses that distort like crazy, long lenses that make things much bigger than you will ever see them, multi-shot panoramas to fit things that don’t fit in the normal pictures boxes into the frame, and so on.
I am manipulating contrast and color to compensate (usually) for how the film or the camera sensor will capture it wrong, so pictures look right. HDR is the best example of this. Most capture media can’t deal with large contrast ranges, so you can use multi-shot tricks to compress the contrast into something that fits, and makes the picture look “right”.
I’m shooting in black and white because it looks better than the real world, even though the real world is in color.
Finally, I am doing all of the above things after the fact in Lightroom or some other software, or in the darkroom, to make the picture look how I thought it looked when I took it.
All of these techniques are standard photographic practice dating back to the start of photography. And for the most part none of them really caused anyone any grief. For example, this Ansel Adams picture of the moon rising over the desert was taken by an artist with an almost unquestioned reputation for making what we would call “straight” photographs. If you ask almost anyone anything about Ansel Adams the one thing they will tell you is that he ran around recording the great American Landscape as it stood there in front of his eyes. And yet:
Black and white.
Ansel Adams is also famous for this “zone system” of exposure and development for black and white film … which is actually just a bunch of fancy heuristics for manipulating lighting, exposure, and contrast.
Ansel Adams was also a master of darkroom trickery. That moonrise picture is almost completely constructed in the darkroom. No one really pays that a second thought.
The truth is that most people don’t care what you do to make your pictures unless what you do calls attention to itself in a way that makes them realize that photographs are all heavily manipulated artifacts with only a very delicate and tenuous connection to reality. Do anything that makes pictures look “not real” and you will be in for a world of trouble.
Two recent astronomical events that from the last two months serve to illustrate this point.
First, there was the solar eclipse. Everyone ran around the totality band taking pictures with their phones. Most enthusiastic photographers set up their tripods and telephotos. And the most enthusiastic set up telescopes and tracking mounts. And the results went all over the Internet. Even I did it.
You know the standard sort of shot:
Everyone was satisfied and happy. No one was upset that to get that framing you need to buy a lens that magnifies the picture by an order of magnitude or two. Zooming in is accepted practice.
Then, about a month later there was the great aurora storm.
Again, everyone was running around their phones taking pictures of the eerie purple and green glow in the sky.
But here the dynamic changed. Whereas with the eclipse pictures the standard manipulations were all accepted without comment, with the aurora there was suddenly a delayed sense of angst and minor outrage. The complaint, of course, was “hey, that’s not what it actually looked like!”
The issue, of course, is that the human eye is not that good at detecting dim and diffuse optical effects in the sky, especially when such effects are competing with existing light pollution and whatnot. So a lot of people went out into the yard looking for this:
And what they saw was a mostly blank sky. It was not until they pointed their phone at the sky that there was any hint of something out of the ordinary. Of course you also would not have seen anything like the above picture unless you were in a plane at the time. But whatever.
Digital cameras, famously, are very good at detecting dim and diffuse optical effects. They are especially good at it if you let them use a long exposure (in this case, 2 or 3 seconds). And newer phones can even do these long exposures without a tripod, because the processing software is smart enough to take a ton of shorter exposures, keep them all in registration, and stack them together to make an aggregate long exposure while also improving the color and noise characteristics of the shot.
Telescope photographers have been playing these games forever. So you can get galaxy pictures from your back yard:
Or incredible shots of Jupiter from the Phillipines (Credit: Chris Go):
But, having the phone do this for you and then posting the shiny purple results on social media without careful disclosure and people will suddenly start complaining about it.
I can understand people being a bit confused about the nature of “night mode” picture taking with modern phone cameras. It should not be possible. I get it. I have some sympathy for people not realizing what is going on (see also: my story at the end).
But, I do not have sympathy for some of the discourse that tried to frame this kind of photographic practice as something akin to Hollywood special effects, or the kinds of tricks people do in Photoshop to make human fashion models look like fashion models, or “food” look like “food”. Those techniques involve using digital manipulation to blend what amounts to illustration into an existing photograph in order to actually add things to the picture that were never there, or remove things that were in front of the camera that you didn’t want to be there. We are not really talking about that here. Making claims that we are talking about that here is about as dumb as thinking that all digital photographs are inherently manipulated and untrue. Which is also wrong.
The aurora pictures are a result of technology in the phone amplifying what the phone camera was already good at to get a picture that you can’t see, but was in fact in front of you the whole time. And there is a long tradition of photography being used to do that.
In particular, pictures at night have always done this, because cameras can do time exposure and your eyeballs can’t. As one last example photo, here is maybe the best picture I ever shot in Paris. At least it’s my favorite:
There is lots of stuff going on there you would not have seen if you were standing there.
And finally, a closing story.
On one of our trips to Paris in the 90s we went to the Arc De Triomphe at night. To get over to the arch you have to cross a 4 or 5 lane roundabout where they staged one of the crazy fights in John Wick 4. Anyway, you go down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel, and then back up. Then you take an elevator and more stairs to get up to the top and gawk at the Champs-Élysées underneath you … all those cars whizzing by.
At the time we went there was a large photograph in the tunnel. It was a giant 5 or 10 foot wide print taken at night with a long time exposure, all the car headlights turned into bright multi-colored streaks and all that.
We were in the tunnel, either heading over to the Arch or back from it, I don’t remember, and there was a man and his wife looking at the photo. And the man was heard to say something like: “Man this is nonsense, it doesn’t look anything like that up there.”
And so it ever was, and ever will be.