Modern photography seems not very interested in reality. But before going into my point of view, Ansel Adams once received a letter that went something like this:

"I really like your photographs of Yosemite National Park. I went to Yosemite last week and was very disappointed, it looks nothing like your photos."

My pet peeve is not that photographers with "vision" tweak the bejeezus out of their pics with HDR or super saturation or whatever (with sometimes stunningly beautiful results), but that cameras come out-of-the-box set to give exaggerated results on their default settings. As if colors by M&M's marketing department are a good thing.

It's taken me quite some time to figure out how to take a picture which looks like what I saw with no embellishments; I've had to turn down the technology.

For instance, I went walking on the beach with my wife in Pacific Palisades on a cloudy, overcast day and took these:











So, nothing too interesting about these photographs, we've all been to the beach on an overcast day; their main merit is that they look like what I saw. But to get this I had to go into my camera controls, set the picture control to "Neutral" (rather than standard or vivid), set the contrast to zero, set the saturation to zero, etc. In other words, to get something that looks like reality you will have to change the settings in your camera. I've been doing this for awhile now, but it wasn't obvious to me why I wasn't happy with the results in those first few years with digital. For the above photos post-processing was limited to cropping, resizing and sharpening.

I only mention this because sometimes you may not want to have the color in all your photos look like advertisements for candy but you can do something about it.

All photographs with a Nikkor 50mm lens set at f/5.6. I'm also going back to prime lenses and avoiding my zoom lenses. The primes are faster, have less distortion, less of the various light and color aberrations, sharper and are frequently cheaper than the high end zooms.

It is because you use Nikon gear. Canon gear never has this issue.

I am, of course, kidding.

It is sort of true, though. Each manufacturer has their default settings for the mass market and each is noticeably different. Even if you turn all of the bells and whistles off each system will output something different.

If I take a photo with my Canon, and an identical one with my Olympus, I get different results due to the sensor, processor, firmware and lens differences. To your point, each system interprets the image differently.

Then you get into simply different qualities of different lenses. A 50mm F1.8 can be different than a 50mm F1.4 or F1.2 or F2.8 Macro.

All that said, isn't that, in an odd way, part of the fun of photography?

Jeremy

I will now proceed to completely contradict myself, at least on the surface. (Canon users take note!) Most landscape photographs, right out of the camera, look pretty bland when it comes to definition and acuity. Even with top notch equipment.

Getting it to look "real" and still have some sort of appeal generally means adding "pop" or "punch". Things like dramatic dark skies, clouds that are well defined, contrast which makes the image look sharper, etc. make them more interesting for most viewers. And for this, all software is not created equal. Of the top three RAW converters (Adobe Camera Raw, DxO and Capture One Pro 7) the easiest to use is Capture One.

Here's my evidence, which is just more photos from Joshua Tree National Park (which I have posted elsewhere), but all converted to TIF files with Capture One Pro 7 and then cropped, downsized and sharpened with Capture NX2 to a small jpg for web posting:











Same camera and lens (figuring out how to get a Nikon to work for your own requirements is a labor of love), same idiot behind the camera and at the keyboard. The only difference is the software. Seems to me like $100 for Capture One Express 7 wouldn't be wasted money if you want to invest a lot of your time in front of computer figuring out why your thousands of dollars of camera equipment aren't producing what you want. Paying $300 for Capture One Pro 7 is a little bit harder decision. By the way, the full pro version is on sale until end of May for $150 instead of $300.

Before anybody gets carried away, it doesn't do this automatically. You still need to know something about photo post-processing.