Pål Jensen wrote:
Right. One of the reason Velvia became the benchmark for outdoor use is that it actually convey the concept or green or yellow for that matter, something that is not always true for other films. There are no film known to man that copy the world as it "is". Our brain doesn't see the world as it is either. We do heavy processing of the image in the brain. Velvia is saturated, true, but it isn't off (like many other "realistic" films - eg Provia whose skies can be found nowhere on Earth!). And if saturated colors are so bad, what do we make out of black and white? It is certanly not real! Photography is such an artifical input that you cannot make an sucessful image by just "copying" reality...
Those are good points that almost can't be overstressed. For the most part we want our pictures to look 'real'. That's pretty much impossible but we try to get close. My real is different from your real is different from Jack's real.
Now the website Rob Studdert showed us with the gross cartoonlike colors, where there was additional saturation added on top of Velvia, was over the top and too much. But even then... well if the images sell that's a shame but... but that's not Velvia out of the box either.
Most night shots are not 'real' (really the way it looked to the human eye) and shots taken with split density filters are not 'real', and blurred waterfalls are not 'real'...
Tom C. (I reject your reality and substitute one of my own). :-)
