Day 139 - Impressionist blur and a short rant

I saw a photo magazine piece recently about creating an impressionist style picture of woodland using Photoshop's motion blur filter.  It struck me that this is a perfect example of the side of digital photography that really annoys me.  More accurately, it is the absence of photography that really annoys me.  Techniques like this are interesting, but can equally be achieved in camera with the same, or sometimes less, effort.  It just takes a bit of thought with the camera in hand, rather than more hours spent in front of the laptop.  Photographers, and photography magazine editors in particular, seem to be forgetting the photography part of digital photography.

The most ludicrous example of this that I've seem was a recent magazine focusing on the use of flash.  One article spoke about the use of fill flash to improve daylight portraits.  The following piece was about how to replicate the look of fill flash using Photoshop.  Is there anyone out there incapable of finding the button to pop up their flash?  Is there anyone reading a digital photography magazine who doesn't have a flash on their camera?  Why on Earth should anyone need this technique?  Even most mobile phones have a flash capable of giving a usable bit of fill light.


This reliance on digital to fix things that shouldn't need to be fixed goes right to the top of the photographic tree.  In "Annie Leibovitz at Work" the great photographer talks about her famous portrait of the Queen.  Famous in part for the controversial editing of a BBC documentary that cost the Controller of the BBC his job...  You can read an extract from the book here, but the most interesting thing for me was that Annie shot Lizzie W in front of a grey backdrop and added the garden later.  Now, Annie Liebovitz is one of the greats of modern photography, but I have to say I was disappointed when I read this.


So, at the end of all that, here's my impressionist woodland with motion blur.  Technical details - Blur created with the moving-your-damn-hand tool in Photographer 1.0 with my camera phone.


If anyone else has examples of cutting edge in-camera techniques (or "photography") used in place of old school Photoshop, let me know and I'll post them!