Photographers, You're Being Replaced By Software 282
Mrs. Grundy writes "CGI software, even open-source software like Blender, continues to improve in quality, speed and ease-of-use. Photographer Mark Meyer wonders how long it will be before large segments of the photography industry are replaced by software and become the latest casualty to fall to outsourcing. Some imagery once the domain of photographers has already moved to CGI. Is any segment of the photography market safe? Will we soon accept digital renderings in places where we used to expect photographs?"
Not outsourcing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CGI wishes (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like all those pinup photos from WWII? Here's a before and after [imgur.com]. (NSFWish, they're pinups). People have been photoshopping since before photoshop was invented. They still paid a team of analog artists to fix up all those photographs.
Re:CGI wishes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:CGI wishes (Score:5, Informative)
Most people don't trust "Photojournalism" because of how easy it is to "stage" a photo to get the desired "effect" (propaganda)
http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/ [zombietime.com]
http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/faking.html [fullerton.edu]
Re:CGI wishes (Score:4, Informative)
Photography's saving grace has always been that it is fairly easy to tell the real from the fake for all but the highest quality forgeries, and then an expert can usually uncover it.
Read up on your history of photography a bit. Like the Crimean War pictures. Photographs have always been altered. And people have argued whether or not a particular photograph has been altered since the beginning of photography. Photoshop only made things easier and lowered the bar.
Way lowered it. [psdisasters.com]
Re:CGI wishes (Score:5, Informative)
F-stop is only part of how you control depth of field. If you're shooting landscapes and you don't have an aperture small enough to get the depth of field you want, the only solution is to do a front tilt. This extends your plane of focus beyond the depth of field and allows you to get your foregrounds and backgrounds in sharp focus, even if the required DOF is huge. This is built in to LF cameras, but you can also get the same effect on medium format and 35mm equivalents by using tilt-shift adapters.
Product and architectural photographers make extensive use of large format cameras and their abilities to either control or distort perspective, focus areas, and DOF. Typically, these options aren't available to cameras that have their lens elements in fixed barrels.