A friend recently emailed me a link to a wedding photographer’s blog. Some of the work there was good, but I didn’t add it add the site to the blogroll here because most of it was what I am going to call “shouty photography”. The photographer had an excellent eye for composition and for an unusual viewpoint, but there was a lot of check-out-my-new-lens wide-angle/fish-eye stuff and every frame was Photoshopped to Hell: the colours were over-saturated, the brightness and contrast were cranked up, and I suspect that all sorts of background clutter had been removed by computer. (Given the intensity of the flash lighting used and the quality of those shadows that remained in the images, I am sure that others had been cloned out.) And of course, he’d been painting that artificial blur all over the place as only a man with a digital camera and the vaguest idea about aperture settings can.

I’m sure he doesn’t need the help of a link from me. His is a style that probably grabs clients immediately. I am happy to recommend other photographers with different approaches from mine, but I would never recommend one like him.

Shouty photography reminds me of the extremely stylised, self-proclaimed “new generation portraiture” of Venture, the high street family photographer. It’s expensive (to buy, if not to do), it’s manipulative (in more than one sense of that word), it’s fake, and it’s about images and not about people. When you browse a wedding photographer’s portfolio, you should be smiling at the moments captured, not thinking: “I wonder how he got that angle/effect/pose?” All photography dates, but the worst thing about this kind of work is that it’s dated the moment you get the prints. Today’s new generation is tomorrow’s old generation. In a few months time, every domestic camera owner will be using their home PC and some knocked-off digital photo software to create the same or similar effects in the hope of spicing up their own grey snaps. Then the game will be up. Ten years hence, photos that have been treated this way will be the still equivalent of those psychedelic visuals you see on old editions of Top Of The Pops.

If you are looking for a wedding photographer and one sidles up to you with an album that, the moment he opens it, screams “look at me!” then block your ears. When you’re 64, you’ll be glad you did.

I’ve written here before about the things you can learn about still photography from movies. Today, via lifehacker, I read about how you can use Photoshop to make your photographs look like movie stills.

Today’s featured technology article on Wikipedia is about 35mm film.

To demonstrate further that I am not down on Photoshop per se, via Lifehacker, here’s a tutorial that explains how you can make your photos look older with Photoshop.

A commercial photographer friend of mine who rather likes digital photography complained to me a while back that he had no objection to the manipulation of images, digital or otherwise, with Photoshop to improve them; his real problem was with its growing widespread use by the ignorant and incompetent—and he was talking about people who get paid to use the program—to unintentionally make images look worse.

One of my current bugbears is the artificial selective defocusing of the background in close-up photos of, for example, flowers or delicate items of food. Lifestyle magazines are full of this lately. Some news magazines have even started doing it with portraits of interviewees.

The aim is to imitate the effect of a macro photograph taken with a film camera and the aperture wide open. The result is as appealing as you get when you smear Vaseline on a portrait lens. It can be faked passably by someone who understands how a film photograph really looks (and the underlying optical reasons for it), but it rarely is. It’s the visual equivalent of ear-scratching digital reverb on badly recorded pop music from the 80s. The irony is that digital can be a wonderful medium for macro work; just as new technology makes it easier to produce and manipulate a superb result, the people wielding it lack the talent or care to produce even a mediocre one.

The images of celebrities on the covers of magazines are another source of irritation to me. In most cases the people responsible for creating them have used the Photoshop “heal” tool—or whatever it’s called; I’m not a Photoshop user—so aggressively to smooth away any inhomogeneity in their subjects’ skin that the women (it’s usually women) they depict might as well have been extruded from a rubber mould.

My objection to this is an aesthetic one, but there are of course very good ethical ones about the effect of such unrealistic images of idealised femininity on women who don’t have their own personal stylists, including women who are in reality more beautiful than those held up as an example to them. But such images sell magazines and sell cosmetics and sell plastic surgery—even to the women depicted in them. In fact it’s hard to persuade women, or indeed men, to buy magazines that publish authentic images of other women. Even those rags that specialise in catching celebrities off-guard or off-duty use Photoshop in reverse to exaggerate their physical imperfections.

There are plenty of before-and-after type sites around the Web these days, where you can see how Photoshop is routinely used to manipulate images in the media, but via Paintalicious [link broken 15:05 04Jan07] I saw for the first time [I don't have a TV] an illustration of the whole process shot in time lapse style with a moving picture camera (and paid for by a cosmetics company!). The result is a short film called Evolution.

UPDATE: This reply video is brilliant too.

Now that most people use digital cameras, it’s getting harder and harder to buy film in high-street shops anyway, but the stuff that is for sale at an airport or chemist’s shop or supermarket usually has three things wrong with it: it’s overpriced, it’s not fast enough (usually the speed is 200ASA), and the colour is over-the-top.

I don’t use consumer stock for weddings so I’ve illustrated this post with a family snap showing the intense saturation of conventional 200ASA colour film. Because the colours of my niece’s eyes and my mother’s skin and clothing are so strong anyway this shot worked. [One advantage of using such slow film, however, is that the original is a lot sharper than this thumbnail---you can click the compressed image above to see a slightly higher-res scan.]

However, normally, northern European flesh draped in the subdued greys and ivories of wedding dress benefits from the much milder tones of black-and-white or colour portrait film. I use Kodak Portra NC 400 or Fuji Pro 400H colour films and Kodak BW400CN and Fuji NEOPAN 400CN black-and-white. These latter two monochrome films are very handy because they can be developed in conventional colour processors. Even so, you should ask for the results to be printed onto black-and-white paper if you can because it has finer grain and won’t come out of the lab with the slight cast that you usually find when your negatives are printed onto colour paper. (Though you might want a sepia tone to your prints of course.)

400ASA film is so much better for candids as it allows you to use faster shutter speeds and/or work in lower light. These days it’s so much finer grained than it used to be that older photographers’s prejudices against such fast stock can safely be ignored. Even at its worst it has higher resolution than all but the very best digital sensors. It’s ironic that, as digital is taking over, film technology has become so refined that, even on a rainy day, 400 film can take live action pictures as sharp and warm as this one.

[All of the above advice assumes that you have at least one decent lens on your camera and are taking photographs of humans rather than buildings or landscapes.]