Howard : : Well since I made the orginal comment I'm sitting here feeling a little : bit rebuked! But only a little: it was a personal comment, i.e. my own : feelings not a snipe at Marilyn's work or at anyone else's. Perhaps I'm : a little bit jaundiced by spending a lot of my time steering "raw" : students away from the idea that every digital photograph needs to be : photoshopped to be valued and the whackier the result the better it : becomes. As I said in my original post I can neither paint nor draw and : am envious of those who can. So I'd love to see see Marilyn's paintings. : The difference - for me - though comes between the purely manual skills : the painter has and those that are derived no matter how cleverly, from : those of the skilled programmers at Adobe or elsewhere. Nevertheless, I : admire the work of Bert Monroy; though I do find his work somewhat : sterile I could never achieve anything even remotely as skilled. : Likewise the creations of people succeeding in the Photoshop User Awards : (see http://www.photoshopuserawards.com/winners.php). : But maybe I just feel that Photography is in danger of forgetting and : losing its roots which were based in some effort to capture a real : moment, in favour of generative and non-real image making. That : Photography is about "as it is" and not fantasy. : Perhaps I'm a Luddite in the new world of digital imagery!! nope, I know what you mean. The college I taught at directed more and more of the course toward spending time on digital manipulation and I felt it was forgetting to teach people photography. Maybe it was fine if it was an Art course, but this was a diploma of applied science. Even so, even for an art course I felt a course about photography should teach photography and maybe run a separate unit/course teaching digital image manipulation (with prerequisites in basic computing please!) There were countless instances where I observed basic skills being ignored or glossed over in the rush to get a mediocre image to the computers where the 'real' work could be started and it irked me.. getting the image right in-camera was the prime responsibility of a photographer - let the printer / graphic designer / artist do what they must after the fact (whether that also be the same person as the photographer or otherwise) but let the photographer concentrate on getting the best photograph possible first! and yes, just as in times gone by when textured surface printing papers could get a photographer out of a sticky corner, digital twiddling can do the same but in time the novelty will probably wear off as it did with funky papers and the image will be viewed as it is - mediocre and fiddled in the vain hope of escaping criticism. this in no way is a criticism of anyones images here btw - I'll level such directly when I see fit :) karl
