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BobsBoy47 130 Miles East of Wotton 456 posts. Jan 19th 2013 15:18 Report Abuse Photography to please the eye is no less an achievement than creating music to please the ear. Perhaps a good test of one's ability as a photographer is could you live with the photo you have taken hanging on your living room wall and enjoy looking at it everyday? When you are out with the camera 'seeing the picture' is primary, capturing the image secondary. Digital imaging gives us the luxury of taking as many pics as we like and discarding those which do not make the grade. Photomanipulation programmes allow tweaking of the image to enhance it further. Nowadays most cameras have 'auto' focusing and exposure and will usually deliver good pictures. All of which suggests that the act of taking a photograph is easy and so it is, or so I thought having toted a camera (both film and digital) since 1963. However, I recently visited the 'Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012' exhibition in London and was 'gobsmacked' by the very high standard of work on show. Inspirational is a word I don't use very often but this exhibition made me stop and admire the sheer impact created by the enlarged images on display. I marvelled at the lighting of scenes, the beauty of scenery we have in the UK, the ingenuity and skill taken by the photographers to capture those images. It also made me think just how many excellent photographers are out there and how much harder I need to try to achieve (with my 'prosumer' DSLR) or better those works for my own enjoyment. Zens' pictures from his DSLR show what beauty exists in the hills and places which surround W-u-E and how the lighting can deliver brilliant images which would have not been out of place in the landscape exhibition.

ZenCat Planet Earth 1,829 posts. Jan 19th 2013 17:02 Report Abuse I disagree. Photography, in its purest form as a process of accurately documenting the visual reality you see in front of you, is not as creative a process as composing music. Its equivalent in sound is recording the sound of a running stream, for example. Beautiful, of course, and indeed it does take skill, but you're documenting what already exists rather than creating something that didn't already exist. The image equivalent to composing music would be to digitally create scenes which do not exist in reality. And of course, people do do that. Personally I've never got into that in a big way, although I have in the past created highly processed unreal looking images from my photos. That's kind of half-way between photography and digital art, and the sound equivalent to that would be recording samples and then playing around with them in audio editing software to turn them into something different. Of course, the level of professional photography that you talk about, where you see truly amazing pictures, of course that is amazing. But it is still an act of skillfully recording what is already there, rather than creating something which wasn't there before. The word "creative" means to create something. Normal photography is skillful documenting, not creating. The line between "documenting" and "creating" can of course be blurred by doing something creative with it once you have captured the image, or indeed with creative use of lighting to create a scene which was not there before. Or, to compare it to writing: if you write about an event that happened, strictly sticking to facts, then you are not doing creative writing, you are documenting an event. But if you write a fictional story, then you are being creative, because you are creating something that didn't exist before. Of course, again, the line can be blurred, as many journalists are creative with their interpretation of factual events. For me personally, I like the landscape around me, which is why I enjoy recording it. I do enjoy that. But it is nothing like the same creative process as when I compose a new piece of music.

Chandrasekar Just round the corner from someone else 14,553 posts. Mar 23rd 2013 08:01 Report Abuse Snowing again then.

ZenCat Planet Earth 1,829 posts. Mar 23rd 2013 08:56 Report Abuse Yes, this is correct information.

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