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Thread: Why editing is so subjective.

  1. #1

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    Why editing is so subjective.


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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Interesting - I'm so glad that I am 'alone in my mind' sometimes

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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    hehehe.... how about environmental influences.
    like some guy born in Germany would grow up speaking German and so on......................

    explanatory gap.

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    John Morton's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Yeah; there is a very basic philosophic disjunction at work behind that presentation. Up uintil about the 1940's it was assumed that perception and imagination were identical; that is, what we call mental imagery is simply a form or special case of perception. This assumption was inherent in the phenomenological studies of Edmund Husserl; but Jean Paul Sartre, in his seminal text "The Imaginary," convincingly demonstrated that imagination - mental imagery - is a specific and unique form of consciousness which is separate and separable from perception.

    The presenter in the link above falls into that logical trap which Sartre laid bare: if imagination is a special form of perception, then the fact that imagination - mental imagery - varies from person to person implies that perception might also. However, since "imaging consciousness" (as Sartre would call it) is in itself a distinct form of consciousness, any differences between individuals that we can note pertaining to the imagination do NOT imply a requisite and complementary difference in perception.

    In other words, the fact that any of us might think of something differently than someone else in no way establishes that we can therefore necessarily directly perceive the same things differently. My perception can never be shown to match your image; your image will never be shown to match my perception: but perceptions and imagery are distinct and different states of consciousness, so, why would they necessarily be co-referential?

    The empiricists ask, "Think of a color you have never seen" to demonstrate that imaging consciousness is contingent upon perception; that we produce mental images from perceptual experience. At the same time, I am unaware of anyone who has had their direct perceptions of reality warped through viewing surrealist images; so while mental images are contingent upon perception, the fact that imaging consciousness can and does deviate from direct perception does not establish that perceptions vary from themselves.

    I can imagine things differently from one moment to the next; but I do not find that things I look at shift and change in my direct perception. Thus I have no reason to suspect that the perceptions of others will vary as widely from mine as my own imagination can vary from itself.

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    pnodrog's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    It is very annoying - you edit a photograph so that it is perfect and all these other people come along and make subjective comments.

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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Quote Originally Posted by pnodrog View Post
    It is very annoying - you edit a photograph so that it is perfect and all these other people come along and make subjective comments.
    That is how artistic movements are started, you ignore the comments and exhibit in your own eye. One day there will be a "no editing allowed" movement.

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    John Morton's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Okay so here is the short version critique of that "color is subjective" video, by way of Jean Paul Sartre:

    Take a simple cube. It has six sides, but, you can never actually see all sides at the same time. You have to turn it around in your hand to see each side, and count them to find that there are indeed six. That's perception.

    Think of a simple cube. You can, in your mental image, hold an image of a cube wherein you know in a single instant that this object has six sides. You do not need to rotate the cube to know this. That's imaging consciousness.

    Now, think of the Parthenon in the Acropolis of Athens - a building for which most people can form a mental image. But, how many columns does it have? Can you count them? Can you count them accurately? You can certainly come up with a number for the columns; but, it will just the number of columns that you put into the mental image: in other words, you are actively PRODUCING that number for the columns as you create the mental image in your mind. Your mental image of the Parthenon is whole a construct of the mind, it is produced by the mind, and although it might be based upon the memory of a perception it is in fact as a mental image just an act of consciousness, and not a perception.

    Now, what the guy in the "red is subjective" video is telling us is: "You have no way of knowing if your mental image of a six sided cube is the same as another person's mental image of a six sided cube, so we will never know if we all have the same idea of what six is or not."

    Duh.

    As a branch of philosophy called 'Logical Positivism' use to say: "If a proposition can not be show to be true, nor demonstrated to be false and if in fact there is no possible set of circumstances through which the veracity or falsity of a proposition can be established, then, we must conclude that the proposition is itself meaningless."

    Whether or not we all have the same mental image of what "red" might be is a meaningless question that has no real world applications, as witnessed by the fact that innumerable devices designed to capture images have no difficulty whatsoever in discerning the color "red."

    I think I remember the guy in that "red is subjective" video from high school, though. He was the guy who was always on about: "Whoa, man, like atoms are just like the solar system man so, like, we could all have billions of little solar systems in the atoms of our, like fingernail, man, and there could be billions of these little tiny people on the planets in these little tiny solar systems that are the atoms that make up our finger nails, man..."

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    RustBeltRaw's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowman View Post
    That is how artistic movements are started, you ignore the comments and exhibit in your own eye. One day there will be a "no editing allowed" movement.
    Have you seen the #nofilter tag on Instagram and Twitter?

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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    subjective?

    One time a member posted his landscape image. It had mountains in the background, lake in the middle and rocks in the foreground.

    Right away, some members said clone out those rocks coz ( or is "because" the right word? ) they were distracting. Just leave the mountains and the lake.

    But I remember a B&W photo that had the same style: rocks in the foreground, a river or was it a lake in the middle and mountains in the background. Yet, this was hailed as a masterpiece . No one said anything about cloning out the rocks in the foreground?!?


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    pnodrog's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Quote Originally Posted by nimitzbenedicto View Post
    subjective?

    One time a member posted his landscape image. It had mountains in the background, lake in the middle and rocks in the foreground.

    Right away, some members said clone out those rocks coz ( or is "because" the right word? ) they were distracting. Just leave the mountains and the lake.

    But I remember a B&W photo that had the same style: rocks in the foreground, a river or was it a lake in the middle and mountains in the background. Yet, this was hailed as a masterpiece . No one said anything about cloning out the rocks in the foreground?!?

    The photographers who do B&W do so because colour is much more difficult to master and because of their limitation we are far more lenient on them.
    Rocks in the foreground can be great but they need to be in the right place so as much as I like my first explanation it is possibly invalid. No doubt I will soon know. (What is Scottish time? surely not GMT)
    Last edited by pnodrog; 26th February 2013 at 09:37 AM.

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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Quote Originally Posted by pnodrog View Post
    The photographers who do B&W do so because colour is much more difficult to master and because of their limitation we are far more lenient on them.
    Rocks in the foreground can be great but they need to be in the right place so as much as I like my first explanation it is possibly invalid. No doubt I will soon know. (What is Scottish time? surly not GMT)
    perhaps this vid on youtube can add inputs to this thread.

    Art Movements Through Photography

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Bx5krtLZY

  12. #12
    Shadowman's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    [QUOTE=pnodrog;292542]The photographers who do B&W do so because colour is much more difficult to master and because of their limitation we are far more lenient on them.
    QUOTE]

    I heard that B&W photography lost favor with the invention of the color television. You see before this invention travel was expensive so photographers utilized television for their subject matter.....then BOOM overnight a new movement was born.
    Last edited by Shadowman; 26th February 2013 at 12:52 PM.

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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    The more I learn about something, the deeper my perceptions of it. I suggest that the same neurons are used for both perceptions and imagination, meaning that the parts of our brains in use do not vary appreciably. For example, the visual cortex is used for imagining something we see in our imagination, or perceiving that which is plainly before us. The wetware being in the same place and used for the same things, (it is, PET scans prove it), places limitations on what can be imagined. Husserl's ideas led to a dead end a hundred years ago, and Sarte was a far better philosopher than he was a neuropsychologist.

  14. #14
    John Morton's Avatar
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    Re: Why editing is so subjective.

    Quote Originally Posted by Milt View Post
    The more I learn about something, the deeper my perceptions of it. I suggest that the same neurons are used for both perceptions and imagination, meaning that the parts of our brains in use do not vary appreciably. For example, the visual cortex is used for imagining something we see in our imagination, or perceiving that which is plainly before us. The wetware being in the same place and used for the same things, (it is, PET scans prove it), places limitations on what can be imagined. Husserl's ideas led to a dead end a hundred years ago, and Sarte was a far better philosopher than he was a neuropsychologist.
    Milt, you might enjoy the work of Melvin Goodale and David Milner, who have writing a very good text called "Sight Unseen." They also have a much more detailed and technical work called "The Visual Brain In Action," but "Sight Unseen" is a much more accessible book. It outlines their exploration of the phenomenon called "blindsight," wherein patients who have lost various aspects of their visual processing due to neurological injuries still exhibit various aspects of sight. It is a fascinating text, and clearly demonstrates the existence of two distinct neural pathways in the brain for processing visual information. The first, "Dorsal Steam Processing," processes moment-by-moment variations in spatial arrangement and distances relative to the observer; and this stream of visual processing is primarily non-conscious in that it occurs without our being aware of mental imagery associated with it. The second, "Ventral Stream Visual Processing," is associated without mental imagery to the extent that this is where what we "see" in our minds' eye is produced.

    Interestingly, only Ventral Stream Processing is subject to those little optical illusions we all delight in from time to time; Dorsal Stream Processing has been shown to be immune to the visual ambiguities of drawings designed to fool the eye into seeing things other than they actually are.

    I find such material very interesting, as I was studying philosophy at the time when the paradigm of language-as-thought was being superseded by the biological model of brain states. Husserl wasn't really a dead end because, although his conclusions were tainted by an idealism which bordered upon ideology at times, his phenomenological method - describing mental events simply as they appear to be, with the element of the observing person's personal investments "bracketed" and excluded from the descriptions which result - was and is still a very powerful philosophic tool.

    As for Sartre, it really isn't fair to judge him as a neuropsychologist at a time when such a field did not exist per say. In fact, his attempts to bring the scientific study of mental phenomena into philosophic discourse were groundbreaking. The fact that Sartre was a better philosopher than neuropsychologist simply underlines how great a philosopher he was.

    In either case, though, the clarity and concision of thought that these two men put into their writings is far and away beyond what is now the norm for most who write today. The argument advanced by the person in the video that grounds this thread is, quite frankly, shoddy at best and intentionally misleading at worst.

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