Gizmo

Popped in to town to look for inspiration  for the project I'm doing (see Saturday). Played around in Snapseed with this circuit board I found in a shop. Enough stuff here to get to the moon I reckon. It was easier to use my phone for this than the SLR.

I see Don McCullin has been taking a pop at the manipulation that goes on in digital photography, saying that it can be totally lying. To some extent I agree with him. I hate to see people adding birds, people and objects to their scenes as enhancements in a way that deceives and would never follow or send adoring messages to blippers who did this. It just encourages them. On the other hand, if people like doing this and if people who see their pictures like them, who am I to comment? But it's clear sometimes in comments that people have been deceived and that doesn't seem right.

It's one thing using a bit of photoshop to remove a blemish or a discarded sweet wrapper, say, or to give something a bit of filtered pop as in the above; quite another to add and subtract stuff wholesale or to enrich colour so much that it bears no resemblance to the actual scene. Glow is something we hang around to find on mornings and evenings; it's special - not something we should pull off the shelf on a dank day.

Deception in photography precedes the digital age. Much of what we see in World War I films and photographs was staged for the cameras. But that doesn't make it right and it undermines the honest work of photographers like McCullin who were there to tell the truth.