A couple days ago I posted a link to an article that talked about the fine line between Fine Art Photography and Digital Art.

Even before reading that article, I’d been doing a lot of thinking on this subject. Since coming across the amazing art of Andy Heatwole on his site BlueHourPhoto, and viewing his tutorials on how he makes his art, I’ve been playing around with many of my images and pushing the boundaries of that fine line. It’s got me to wondering though, am I pushing my images beyond the boundaries of photography and bringing them into the world of digital art?

Before I answer that question let’s first look at what digital art is and how it can sometimes be confused with photography.
I love creating digital landscape art. I use a program called Bryce to create the landscapes and then use Daz Studio to add and pose the models in the scene. I’ve been doing this for a good 8 years now. The landscapes that you create are so realistic that it’s hard to tell whether the image is a photo or not. Here is an example of a simple image that I made and sell for stock. Many people have asked me how I took such and amazing photo. Being an honest guy I tell them the truth, it’s not a photo but a digital image.

But as you can see, it would be pretty easy to push this off as an amazing photograph that I shot while I was flying around with this eagle :-)

With modern software that anyone can buy for under a hundred dollars, it is very easy to make images like this and say that they’re photographs. Personally I enjoy telling people that I created this on the computer. It shows that I have other artistic talents besides photography.

Now we come to the first side of our issue, real photographs that are digitally enhanced, but not in an unnatural way. Take my image of the Sierra Wave over Round Valley. This image has been worked in Photoshop. I added contrast, lightened up the mountains a little, and darkened the foreground some. I didn’t add any color or saturation to the image because it didn’t need it. The camera picked up the color beautifuly. But had the color been a little flat, I would have added a little color. The final image of this shot is very close to what I saw that morning. The work I did in Photoshop is pretty extensive, but it doesn’t create an unnatural feel to the image, nor is the image altered in any way from how the scene looked in realtiy. So, do I consider this image Digital Art? No I don’t. What I did in Photoshop was no different than what black and white photographers have been doing in the darkroom for years. I made the image look how I envisioned it when I took it. Thankfully, doing work like this in Photoshop is now excepted by most people. I remember in the late 90′s reading the heated arguments in photo magizines about using Photoshop to enhance images. Those debates got pretty nasty at times.

Ok, in the first example I showed you what I consider to be digital art and how it can be confused with photography. In the second example I showed you a photograph that uses digital technology as a tool in creating the final image, but doesn’t do it in an unnatural way. Now we’re going to walk that fine line between the two mediums. This is where things get a little hard to categorize.

Here is an image of Cascade Falls in Yosemite National Park.

Its a nice shot, but it’s really no big deal. The light was very flat and the falls were in shadow so the original image is very cold and blue. I warmed this one up a little and added a little contrast. But no matter what I tried to do to this image I couldn’t get it to look like I wanted it to. In fact, I don’t even know how I want it to look.

 

So I decided to really play around with it and see if I could come up with something very different. Here is what I came up with.

Pretty different don’t you think? Has a fairy tale look to it. You almost expect to see elves and fairies amongst the rocks and bushes.

But to tell you the truth, I’m still not satisfied with this image.

I wanted to show it to you though because it’s a perfect example of a photograph that has been so dramatically changed in Photoshop that I can’t honestly call it a photo anymore. In my mind this is a piece of digital art. The camera captured the scene, but the lighting, color, and atmosphere were created on the computer.

 

I imagine that some people would still consider this a photo. In fact I know that many would. I see it all the time as I’m looking at photo galleries online. Images that have been dramatically altered in Photoshop, but there isn’t any mention of that. My twenty years of photography experience and 10 years of photoshop experience allow me to see through this. But I bet many people don’t see through it and think that this person is the greatest photographer in the world. That’s to bad.

So where does this leave us? I guess it leaves us with the question, what is a photograph and what is digital art?

In my mind, a photograph that uses the camera as the main tool in the creation of the final image and that hasn’t been digitally enhanced to the point of it looking unnatural, belongs in the medium of photography.

A photograph crosses into the medium of digital art when the computer becomes the main tool in the creation process and the camera is used only to capture the basic image.

Is either of these two the right or wrong way to do things? In my opinion they’re both right. It’s art. And the creation of art is limitless and has no rules. But I also feel it’s important not to deceive people. If your image is beautiful because of your photography skills then great. But if it’s beautiful because of your Photoshop skills, then let people know that. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve worked just as hard learning your skills as a top photographer has learning his.

So back to my original question. Am I pushing my images into the realm of digital art? Yes I am. And no I’m not. It all depends on the image and the vision I have in my mind for it. If I capture that vision with the camera then that’s great. But if the only way to create that vision is to do it on the computer, then I will do it. But I will always tell you that I did it.

I’d like to know what your opinions are on this subject. Please comment on this post and let us know what you think.

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