Truth In Advertising

I used to be anti-digital. I think my problem with digital photography was that it seemed to0 easy to manipulate, that it could lie. One of the reasons I like photography is that it shows truth. It shows what was there when you pressed the button. I remember being shocked about an article in one of the photo magazines. A wildlife photographer had added a chimpanzee to one of his photos in another magazine. He thought the original photo needed "something" and so he added the chimp. It didn't seem ethical. I would never do that. But guess what? I did. And I did it with a film camera. How shocking!

This photo I took for a photography class. The assigment was to take a roll of pictures, roll back the film, and then re-shoot the roll for a set of double exposures. We weren't supposed to keep track of what we shot the first time so the photos would be random. I cheated a little in that I shot mostly pattern or landscape shots the first round and then the second round had subjects - a flower, a duck, this peacock, etc. I hated that the professor could so easily dismiss my eye and I refused to give up all of it. It may have been random but it was going to have my stamp on it! By golly. :P Anyway, I was lucky that the peacock "fell" into this landscape and not the others. Wouldn't have worked in the other shots, I think. Still, the peacock wasn't there when I took the original photo. It was added to it. Not digitally either. Oooh, what a scandal.

If you look closely at the peacock, you'll see he's disappearing, fading like a dream as you wake. Or he's appearing, like a dream coming to life. Or maybe he's a ghost of a memory, there on the edges but not clear. Or could be you just see a peacock. It depends on how you look at it. That's really all that matters when it comes right down to it. That the viewer gets something out of your photo. Sometimes with photograhy, like life, you have to decide for yourself what's "truth". And truth isn't always what you see when you look thru the lens. I've slowly come to realize that.