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As a professional commercial photographer I’ve always made lots of tests. Cameras, lenses, software, anything photographic.Photography has been my way of life for over 40 years now so it always seemed a shame to let all of my test results sit in a cupboard, or on an external disk somewhere. Then, one day back in 2006 I started a website...........

I hope you find the site useful and informative

David Gold

Review Center

Digital SLR Lens Reviews

Nikon 18-70 AFS DX lens with Nikon D70 Canon 10-22 EFS _DSC9353 web size
Canon EOS 5D digital SLR camera body logo Canon 18-55 EF-S lens on Canon EOS 20D Sigma 70 - 200 f2.8 EX DG  HSM
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Camera RAW Software Reviews

Canon EOS 5D digital camera

Which RAW conversion software is best for your digital SLR camera’s RAW files?
   

Update

If you've been wondering about the lack of updates to the site, the answer's simple – Business is good, very very good, and as a freelance photographer, work has to come first. Over the last few years my business has changed a lot - I used to be able to keep pretty much everything about David Gold Photography in my head, but as the workload has grown I’ve enlisted the help of my older son Ewan and my wife in what is now a family business. I’m a lucky man in that my business life and passion for photography are one and the same thing.  It’s great. I even get paid....well, mostly.... See my blog for more on that.

However, for the first time in over a year pages are being updated. Over the next few weeks the site will change slightly and then be moved to a new hosting service, so apologies for any broken links or missing pages as this goes on.

Over the last few years I’ve also been heavily involved with my local camera club. I’ve just finished two years as President of the Mearns Camera Club and It has been fascinating to get to know a whole other part of amateur photography, and to spend a lot of time with other photo enthusiasts at varying stages of discovering just how wonderful photography is. Competitions are a major part of camera club life and there is some controversy there just now over heavily photoshopped images. When does a photograph stop being a photograph and become art?

OK - I think we’ve agreed that Photography is art.

But can Art be photography?

One major fascination for me in looking at both club and professional photography is that they are moving in opposite directions. My hero photographer has always been Henri Cartier Bresson whose mission was to capture the ”Decisive Moment”. Not to make it, but to capture it. Life. Real life. Professional photography has embraced the freedom that’s come with digital SLRs so that my business clients no longer want formal portraits but instead pay me to take images of their executives looking like they actually did some work. I was never a big fan of the wood panelled boardroom style of portrait, so for me this is bliss. Being paid to take “real” pictures. Perfect.  Even wedding photography has slowly moved to at least a mixture of set groups and lots of “PhotoJournalism” pictures. Unposed?  Well, sometimes at least. Even press photographers no longer want to get an exclusive posed celebrity portrait - they want to catch them on holiday, or walking down to the shops. Why?  So that it looks “Real”.

All of that means that it has come as a surprise for me to find that that camera club photography is going in the opposite direction, and is trying so hard to be “art” that it sometimes hurts to look. Camera club life is dominated by competitions and the scene here in Scotland, and in most of Europe it would seem, is dominated by photographers whose work is much more art than photography. This is not to say it’s bad art, just that the extremely contrived, heavily Photoshopped composite images that often win are simply not what most people consider to be photographs. It seems crazy, but in national club photography competitions we appear to have reached the point where the last thing that will win is anything that looks like a normal photograph.

Photographers who “just” take photographs like my hero Cartier Bresson would have absolutely no chance of winning a national competition any more. Would Henri have taken a kissing couple from Paris and superimposed them on a background of a cafe in Seville, replaced the distracting floor covering with a texture created entirely in Photoshop, then added a sky from Arizona?  Many “creative” competition entries are now constructed like this.

The question is :  Are they still photographs?

To me a photograph is one camera and one click. OK, we’ve always waited for the best light then cropped the image, lightened bits, even darkened the sky - Ansel Adams did a LOT of that. So manipulation isn’t new, it’s just that we can now do so much more, and more easliy. It’s inevitable then that some photographers will push back the boundaries between painting, graphics and photography, and good luck to them. Some of the results are superb, and good art is good art - I’m just not sure that many of them are what people think of and understand as photography. To me that will always be a camera, one click and an end result that at least has some relationship to reality.  

So when you pick up your camera:  Are you a photographer, or an artist, or both?

Whichever you are - Have fun !

 

© David Gold
All text and images copyright 2006 - 2013
and must not be reproduced in any way without permission.
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