Are Your Images on Drugs?

Has anybody else noticed the trend to over-correct digital imagery?  Have you found yourself clicking the "Auto" correct button and going with the results even if your original shot in natural light looked better?

I know I'm guilty as charged. I've checked the brightness on my monitor.  I've checked my eyes.  I'm just not sure what's going on.

Does anybody else have the sneaking suspicion that lots of these photos just might be on drugs?  Don't they seem to be just a little bit hyped-up or wacked-out?

Are your images showing symptoms of aggression or risk-taking?  Have they been argumentative?  Are your photos sweating, restless, anxious, depressed or paranoid?

Okay.  Okay.  I don't mean to make light of the very serious issue of drug addiction.  But I'm telling you that the more time I'm on the internet, the more I'm seeing a very idealised trend in imagery.

It seems that if there's a way to pimp it to the next level, we're all over it.  If I can make something look better, I'll jump!   I think we've all at one time or another been on board with downloading this kind of magic.  I'm hipstaddicted.  Who cares if the colors we're tweaking don't occur in nature or that crap is romanticised to the point of no longer being realistic?  It's better isn't it?

The whole point of printing commercially is to get the results to be as close to reality as possible.  When you think about the catalog industry alone, you quickly realize how very important it is that customers are not returning tons of merchandise due to their orders not looking anything like the colors choices that were in the catalog. 

I've seen stuff that appears to be photographed in everything from dense fog, perhaps in heaven, maybe underwater, or exactly at the moment of a lightening strike.  And although I like a lot of it, I don't like it all the time.  It's sort of like stinky cheese.  A little on a cracker is nice.  A giant wedge reeking up my fridge, not so much.  Sometimes I just miss the old normal.  I don't know what normal "levels" or contrast even are anymore.

How do you guys feel about all this wacky bunsen burner mo-jo happening behind the lens?  Check out the difference in the photos on this post.  The above was taken with my beloved Hipstamatic App, below with the normal camera function on my iPhone.  I've gotta admit that the first one looks like a magical woodland portal and this one just looks like a mutant dying stick tree.  *Insert deep sigh.*

Comments

[Fiona]

While I do feel an urgent need to have an iPhone (more or less because of the camera apps! Ha!), I am starting to get bored with the plethora of hipstamatic photos that I'm seeing online in other blogs and also on Facebook.

I think people in their 30's feel a lot of nostalgia for all the photos from their childhood, and love that high saturation, high brightness, and intensified hue replicated in their own shots. Younger folk just like 'retro' I guess.

I do adjust some, but not all of my shots (in Photoshop). Mostly the brightness, and a bit of cropping. But most of the time I like them au naturale. More realistic I think, and I can leave it to my aging memory to turn it into an idealised, Disney-fied walk through the woods.

[TJ]

Hmm... there seems to be something wrong in my comments! I was sure there was one in here from Anke I was about to answer and now it seems to have disappeared...

Thanks Fiona, you are so right about the nostalgia of it all. It's pretty sweet...

[Veronika]

I must admit I do like these kind of tweaked photos, for me it's just a visual thing really, adding that additional layer just makes it more pleasing to the eye for me and it does add something 'extra' what could be just an ordinary 'subject'. Maybe I'll get bored of it soon too, I don't know, but I do know that I get bored very quickly looking through other people's 'ordinary' shots, mine are worst offenders! :D

[Anne]

There are some photo trends that I am getting REALLY sick of. One is that some people seem to think that just shooting everything with very narrow depth of field makes them a good photographer. It just gets SO BORING to see the same thing over and over and over again. I mean, really, a spoon with just the tip of it in focus is still just a spoon.

But, I do have to say I always wonder how my images look on other people's computers. That was the advantage to the darkroom. You could tell how your print was going to look pretty much anywhere.

[Argumentative Essays]

Are Your Images on Drugs <------that's what i was looking for