I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at photographs online lately, as I’m working towards a new project of mine (more on that later), and one thing that struck me as totally strange is how unacceptable a plain old photo is these days. To explain what I mean, let me give you an example.
I walked by 2 or 3 photography studios here in Bergen and each studio displayed some example works in the window. All the photos the studios showed were crazy-edited beyond even seeming like a photo anymore. They had become something like a photo-realistic-surrealist painting. Yeah weird.
The same can be said of photos online these days. There are trends in digital processing that all the most “interesting” photos seem to follow: slight desaturation, lomo color curves, vignetting, and funky textures. These effects can be applied en masse to every photo ever taken and make them look trendy and funky and hip (at least for now).
The thing that struck me the most though, is that I found myself falling into the sheep’s mind view of it all. I was looking at some very well done photos that were taken with a digital camera, but they looked a bit boring to me. I wondered what it was, but then I realized: the pictures just looked too damned realistic. The photos that you take with today’s digital SLRs look so much like real life it’s just boring.
Or maybe it’s just easier to slap on some Photoshop actions than actually taking pictures of interesting subjects.
