I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result. The process being actually flying the drone, taking long exposures instead of pressing buttons on a keyboard and moving the mouse to generate or modify an image. Why is the former process more appealing than the latter? Both are intellectually challenging processes. I always struggle with this internal dialog.
This is a pretty normal view. I've been a photographer and videographer since I was about 16, and worked freelance and in magazines all over my country before I got into teaching and IT.
If you read any film theory book, you'll eventually come accross Cahiers du Cinéma and André Bazin, one of the philosophers who most greatly influenced the Nouvelle Vague movement of cinema in France.
He would argue that the second you even point the camera at something, that's when the editing of reality starts. So in the end, what really matters, is the expression you're looking for. So work on that, and worry less about the tools you use to get there.
Many have since tried to challenge this view in various ways, including the Direct Cinema, and Cinema Verité movement, and even up to guys like Lars von Trier with his rather stringent Dogme manifesto. Because when you've mastered all other forms, the only way to challenge yourself is to give yourself artificial limits.
So do you morally have to say no to CG or photoshopping? Absolutely not. It's a tool like any other. You can use it to enhance the experience. And with todays digital cameras, it is often needed to glean the experience you had when watching the subject in real life, kind of like the expressionist painters of yore, who would strive to paint the feeling they had with the subject, rather than illustrate "the truth." Or you can willfully subject yourself to artificial limits, because it's a challenge.
With that said, I think the photos shown here reveals brilliant and inspired creativity with new techology and tools, and in the end, that's what it's about: To make something fantastic out of perhaps untraditional tools, either because it's a challenge, or because you have a grand vision—or both.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some inspiration to pick up your camera (any camera, even the one on your iPhone), and challenge yourself.
All the best!
Dabbled with similar photography (* not as good as Wu's), and think it would be a challenge to achieve similar results in Photoshop.
Light painting in the sky is one thing, but getting the light source to simultaneously "paint" the foreground in a realistic way -- so it's suggestive how the two physically interacted -- requires another level of PS wizardry (at least beyond me).
I think you may be able to achieve some nice results by stacking a bunch of exposures of the same scene from different times throughout the day and then use some various blend modes and masking to "paint" with the light.
Possibly. Luminosity masks work really well for bracketed exposures, but stacking different times of day introduces new problems (shadow angles, coloring) that I've struggled to adequately resolve. (Sure it's more a reflection my ability level.)
What's fun about drone lighting is that the detail is all 'real', with most of the 'art' going in the setup / staging. Really fun to see it executed well.
For me, the photos in the linked article look great no matter what the process was to create them. I don't see why they would lose their charm if they were CGI, simply because we tend to know whether we like a picture or not within a split second of first seeing it, while we generally don't know how they were made until later.
But for the pictures in the GP link, I don't think the pictures by themselves are all that interesting; to me almost the entire interest stems from knowing how they were made.
Somewhat comparable to pictures posted on HN a while back that went from "ho-hum, another portrait" to "that's actually interesting" by knowing that these were not real people or real photos, but rather computer generated portraits. (https://petapixel.com/2019/09/20/this-company-is-giving-away... )
So I think charm/appeal can stem from several sources, like pure visual impact, but it can also stem from an appriciation of the process behind it. And I see people sometimes change their minds on how well they like a picture - in either direction - based on how simple or complex they think the process was, even if the picture is identical. (Compare say a picture of a wild wolf pouncing its prey vs the same picture after you've learned that it's stuffed animals and the scene was arranged by the photographer.)
There is also something to be said about the subtle lighting when actually shooting such shots. Doing it with CG is perhaps approachable, but there is a point of diminishing returns when more and more time is spent to close that last few percent of the "realism" gap.
Case in point, I took this long exposure photo in about 15 seconds, provided a bit of setup and specialized hardware. A CG version would have taken (I think) hours and still not quite have the same subtleties in lighting.
https://imgur.com/e4UWiqz
For what it’s worth those images look like photo-shopped to me, too perfect, that’s why they don’t tell me anything (or close to anything). I’m not saying that they are digitally modified, but because they look close enough to that kind of photos then the interest is just not there anymore. The same way some person knowing/remembering all kind of minutiae is a lot less interesting compared to 40-50 years ago, we all now have access to google (i.e. a technical enhancement in our lives similar to what Photoshop means for images).
A simple and perhaps intellectually disappointing explanation is rarity: plenty of CGI with unnatural lighting, we value CGI that gets it right. Plenty of photographs with natural lighting, we value the photograph with an artificial tweak.
Good point. I think it’s a little more than that. Given a rare exceptional work of CG artist and an analog photographer’s rare works - vast majority of the people would gravitate towards the latter. It then leads me to think ease of access to tools (drone vs Photoshop), expediency in creating the works (a weekend shoot vs. 3 hours) and the costs ($400 trip + $800 drone vs. $29 Adobe subscription) is what makes it worthwhile? Is this type of art boiled down to the grunt work one has to do to achieve a result?
I personally resonate with conceptual art that abstracts away the physical processes and work on an ideological space (Francis Bacon, Milos Sobajic, Vladimir Velckovic, Shahabuddin Ahmed, etc). But that’s just me, and I certainly am not in a position to criticize anything in art. Just want to inquire and understand.
I think we (mostly) have the emphasis backwards, and that this is part of your discomfort. We like to focus on the artist, art-object, art-process, art-technique, art-tools, and art-temples.
I think it all makes more sense if you focus on the art-experience.
It is OK for something that wasn't intended as art--like a torn sign, or a true accidental technical glitch--to trigger an art-experience for you. It is OK if knowing--or not-knowing--details about a technique, technology, or process affects whether you have an art experience.
>I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result.
Taking a slightly different tack from the other responses so far: I don't think your second sentence there follows from your first. You are implicitly asserting that "rendered in CG or photoshopped" would and even could in fact produce the exact same art, and thus the process is the only differentiator. But I think an important limitation and value of doing this in the real world is that we cannot in fact actually perfectly reproduce the real world yet down to the visual spectrum limit. We can produce quite good facsimiles for sure, particularly zoomed out or in motion. But for high quality still photography of complex natural environments doing all the physics and replicating all the creation and weathering processes and so on exactly down to micron type levels is hard. Noting does reality like reality for the time being.
So I do think part of the charm/appeal here is precisely that the photographer is photographing something real, so you can really drill deep into the details with the knowledge that a human hand is revealing and highlighting those details, but did not craft them. Whereas with CG a human made decisions about every single bit of it (if only in choosing what algorithms/seeds were used or what result to accept for further work). Which itself can be extremely interesting! But they're genuinely two different things and I think do speak to different aspects of people.
I think to me a significant part is that one process boils down to a game of pushing numbers around (a fun and engaging game, certainly), and the other process requires physically engaging with the logistical difficulties of the world in a way that produces a more directly relatable story. That story may not be part of the image directly, but is sort of implied, and subjectively makes the photographs more immersive.
You need to know about the creative process and story though. Consider you saw one of these images in a gallery, with a label containing only a title - you might well assume the image was digitally altered. Without the context of how the image was created, is the image devalued in your mind?
My wife is an artist, and I struggle with these kind of questions; a seemingly simple image, painting, sculpture or object, might have been the result of weeks or months of creative process - but surely only the artist understands how it came to be?
It would be devalued. The beauty is in the contrast between the perfect geometric shapes painted by a drone and the natural landscape. It's almost alien seeing modern technology and nature coexisting in such a way.
A 3D artist I follow on Instagram has done similar things in CG, and I find them quite compelling. Admitedly the locations he sets them in are well-known to me, which probably amplifies the effect, but I think it's legitimately interesting work nonetheless.
Art stimulates
the non rational parta of the mind. Your conflict is due to your internal inconsistency, brought to the surface of your consciousness when you you brought your mind to bear on the impossible-looking photograph.
yea, this is the exact question i'm thinking in my mind. not knowing the source, would it make it more mysterious? would it make us conclude based on our presumptions - this is nothing but CG / wow cool... someone made long exposure. would it push to know about the creator more to inform the guessing? as an amateur photographer and art appreciator, there are lot of unknowns for me.
