I’ve been working mostly in black and white street photography, where the frame often depends more on weight, shadow, and timing than on clean description.
In this image, I let the blacks get quite heavy because I wanted the figure and the surrounding space to feel slightly hostile, not neatly readable. I’m never fully sure where that line sits: when does contrast become atmosphere, and when does it simply start eating the photograph?
Shot in harsh available light, edited with the shadows left deliberately dense rather than rescued.
Would you pull more detail back from the black areas, or does the loss of information help the image?
Yeah!
So lately I am... dabbling more in colorspaces and such, but from a game dev perspective...
Basically, I think I understand what you're saying, technically, its just that the lingo I would use is maybe a bit different... or maybe I don't actually understand it, technically, lol...
But I can't of a way to phrase it more accurately than what you said, and that... yeah, you hit the balance between the factors/methods you're using perfectly, imo, its ...
...right between 'is this intentionally colorgraded/balanced to seem foreboding?' and 'or is it just actually that the shot itself is framed and composed and lit, naturally, in a foreboding way?'
Yeah I just really like this... I'm going to call it a picture, not an 'image', lol.
That’s a great way to put it. I like that space between “was this deliberately pushed into something foreboding?” and “or was the street already doing that by itself?” That’s pretty much the balance I was trying to keep: not over-explaining the mood with processing, just giving the existing tension a little shove.
Also, thank you for calling it a picture. I agree. “Image” sounds like something trapped in a corporate asset folder. “Picture” still has a pulse.> Yeah!
Aha, I can see that connotation of 'image' as well, what I was trying to go for was the dichotomy between 'computer generated/manipulated' and 'the camera just did that, might have something to do with the cameraman'.
In game dev word... there are no pictures, there is no 'real', its all varying degrees of generating something that may or may not kinda look like 'real'.
Photography... thats capturing the 'real', not fabricating a fascimile of it.
At least thats how I think of the two things. Both certainly complex and potentially quite beautiful, but fundamentally different.
That distinction makes a lot of sense to me. Game dev starts with fabrication, even when it’s trying to imitate reality. Photography starts with something that was actually there, even if the photographer then bends it through framing, exposure, timing, processing, and all the other tiny crimes we politely call “interpretation.”
So yes, I agree: photography is not pure reality, because nothing humans touch remains pure for more than five seconds. But it is still anchored to the real. The street existed. The light existed. The cars were there, committing their usual visual crimes. My job was mostly to decide where to stand, when to press the shutter, and how much of that atmosphere to let survive.
That’s why I like “picture” here too. It feels less like a constructed asset and more like a trace of something that actually happened.> Aha, I can see that connotation of ‘image’ as well, what I was trying to go for was the dichotomy between ‘computer generated/manipulated’ and ‘the camera just did that, might have something to do with the cameraman’.
... High resolution 3d scans do kind of ... blur the line in a new and confusing way.
Essentially, they create a volume of points in 3d space, and then through various different softeware methods, essentially map, or project basically panoramic photos onto those 3d points.
Do that for say the inside of a building, from multiple points... you end up with a damn near photorealistic, 3d, volumetric... 'picture' of the space, a snapshot in time.
Currently, these methods are... way too compute intensive to just directly use in a video game, just way too much data, but you can start from them and then basically do fancy versions of 'simplifying' the scene into less complex 3d data representations, that look almost as good, with layers of ... trickery, basically, as you say, overlayed on top, in realtime.
Also, I'm not sure if you are intentionally... quoting most of what I'm saying, but in the wrong formatting?
Seems you are new to lemmy, so hello! and also here's a run down of lemmy text formatting.
Oooh! I'm sorry. Excuse me my wrong formatting, please.
No problem! Just trying to be helpful to a new lemmy user =D
Thanks, I'm rookie here.