Daily Digital Camera News

Please don’t crucify me for RB, I’m working on a new personal website.
Thanks for this opportunity. I have not used lightroom, neither have I used photoshop, thus I am not positioned to make comparisons.
Why? I graduated from PC to a Mac a short while before I took up digital photography – long story omitted about the ‘film days’ . I-photo seemed invincible at least until I discovered Aperture.

This application gives me what I want, which, I submit is the end of the story. Countless moons back in Kodak days when I learned photography, two things presided. A) good photographic skills and B), darkroom image enhancements. That was it. Fail one or both and your photo was trash. QED! Because image enhancement was limited, photographers learned photography, or they learned to drive taxis instead.

Hence my praise for Aperture. It forgives my trespasses but severely rebukes me for not learning photography. It does not let me “photoshop” artefacts from the scene as though they never existed or manipulate layers as though contriving something that never existed.
Aperture forces me to photograph the ‘scene’ without worrisome artefacts. It drives my learning experience as a photographer and it allows no excuses! It forces me to find a good viewpoint, arrange composition, chose the right settings, become a photographer!

Thus I disagree with Diglloyd’s criticism of Aperture almost entirely. (Almost entirely because Aperture is not perfect, especially in its architecture).

That aside, there is tendency today to blur the distinction between photography and what I will call “image engineering”.
Some photographic competitions specify “no digital alteration permitted” followed by a maximum file size, which usually rules out everything above a 3mp mobile phone shot, never mind RAW. Cropping is digital alteration dammit! Get over meaningless prescriptions I say! Be specific! Define exactly what ‘digital alteration’ means and if you cannot, then stop pretending that a snapshot competition is a photo competition.

At the opposite end of this scale, digital ‘enhancement’ is no more that what we did in darkrooms of old save that to-days tools of digital enhancement are far more sophisticated and dynamic.
So, I would argue, image enhancement is just that. That is what Aperture delivers me. Nothing more or less.

Here again I disagree with Diglloyd’s criticism. Aperture is a tool whereby photographers are enabled to present their photograph as best they can. And though it would help if aperture through its architecture made our computing a few clicks easier, that is not its task. It cannot be judged on that basis therefore.

Either it enables images to be shown in their best light or it does not. Only that which is its sole purpose and function is open to comparison. To make this point clear, light bulbs may be compared according to their lumens and light temperature. How fast they can be switched on and off is an entirely different matter having nothing to do with light output or quality.

Aperture obliges good photography, and if that means I cannot engineer my image to overcome my inadequacy or lack of foresight, then what purpose is served by software that allows me post correct those errors artificially?

I want to be a good photographer. I have no desire to be an image engineer. “Special Effects” in Hollywood have need for those people and I have no wish to apply.