It's all done on computers! - 'A plea for honesty and integrity.'

I was watching 'Pirates of the Caribbean 2' the other night. Again. I make no apologies for this as I think they are fantastic entertainment. Anyway. I had decided to have a look at the 'bonus' disc to see if it really was worth paying the extra for. I shall save the 'directors cut, wide screen edition, bonus disc' debate for another day. The point I am coming to, by a very circuitous route, is a moment in the 'here's the film again but with some bloke talking over it' bit where Orlando Bloom arrives on a beach where someone has rather carelessly parked the 'Black Pearl'. Or rather they haven't. According to our helpful narrator it's not actually there. Such is the power of CGI these days. I have to admit I was stunned. I wasn't expecting them to park a full-blown galleon on the beach, I figured it was just half a hull supported by scaffolding, so this revelation took me by surprise. It was just so convincing.

'Where are you going with this Dave?' I hear you ask. 'Yay! for the guys and girls in Hollywood for being so clever, but we are landscape photographers so what does this have to do with us?' It has to do with trust my friends.

Technology is a wonderful thing. I love gadgets as much as the next man and, as you may have read in some of my other articles, I am a wholehearted convert to the digital way. But ever since the day the first digital camera crawled from the evolutionary swamp there has been a public perception that digital images are in some way 'fake'. Everyone has heard the stories of people having smiles imposed on portraits or figures being erased from images in some form of Stalinist conspiracy. Worse still, people or objects being inserted into locations where they have never existed. Those pictures of me on a night out with Kate Winslet for example. This perception is applied without fear, favour or understanding to all digital images and this is where it becomes a problem for us as landscape photographers in a digital age.

You may well have climbed overnight, through wind and rain, to reach a mountain peak in time to catch those first glorious rays of dawn light as they illuminate the clouds with an ethereal glow, but when you display your work you may well be met with 'That can't be real, it's all done on computer.' Our work and our efforts are devalued purely because the image was captured on a digital camera. Where people believe that with film 'the camera never lies' (if only they knew), with digital they have a tendency to automatically assume that it must be doctored.

For me, one of the joys of landscape photography is the ability to share with others locations and images that show the natural beauty of this planet. But people need to know that what they are looking at actually exists, that the real world is every bit as spectacular as the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

So please, use your tools to their full extent. Use your lenses. Use your filters. Use Photoshop. Clone out that bit of litter you couldn't reach at the time. Adjust your levels and check your white balance. But never, and I mean never, import another sky. Never change the colour of the leaves to make a spring day look like autumn. If the elements aren't quite right, go back another day. Show the scene to it's best advantage, but above all things be honest. In time people will trust digitally captured images in the way they, rightly or wrongly, trust film, but it's up to us to convince them.

As far as digital manipulation goes, to my mind Jeff Goldblum said it best in Jurassic Park.

'Just because we can doesn't mean we should.'





About the author: David Stanley is a freelance photographer concentrating on landscape and travel images. He has growing portfolios of royalty free images with Alamy and istockphoto. For more articles and reviews, along with a selection of his work available as open and limited edition prints, please visit his website at www.davidstanleyphotography.com.

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