I often hear views that a nature photograph should faithfully portray what is seen by human eyes. I would agree to this if purpose of nature photography is only documentation. First of all the medium of capture (sensor/slide/negative) has inherent limitation compared to human eyes and it is theoretically impossible to portray what we see. For example there is no way I could have made an image of the above butterfly which truly appears like what I saw – either we over expose butterfly or under expose background. Obviously I decided to do latter. Isn’t this a nature photograph ? Is this a manipulation ? Should I selectively open up only background by about 2+ stops to show traces of some branches if any? Isn’t it a selective manipulation then – since people think a modification applied to an image as a whole is only considered OK ? Are we waiting for some supreme authorities to tell us what is accepted and what is not ? We have come all the way from digital is unacceptable to cropping is ok to modifications applied to whole image is ok but not to part of the images to crops, curves a little bit of dodging/burning is ok to … What is that next rule that we are waiting for ? I am not talking about placing a tiger’s head on elephant’s using an image processing software but some of us seem to create boundaries for ourselves in terms of what is accepted. Recently I was talking to a very senior wild life photographer and was telling him I am tired of seeing stereotypic images of xyz bird with feed kind of images and we need to think of something more original and creative. He asked me – “God has created everything, what is there for us to create?” – needless to say I strongly disagreed with him. We are not talking about physically creating something here – but some new perspectives that our inner vision sees and we giving it an expression in the form of an image.
I think following strict rules on what should nature photography be is killing our own creativity. I do think human mind wants to see perspectives which are beyond faithful representation of physical world.
