Cloning versus Gardening

Moonrise, Firehole River. Yellowstone NP, 2013

So, you are out in the wilds of the back o’ beyond and you have set up your tripod to capture this delicious sunset scene when you notice two very inconvenient weeds growing up right into the corner of your frame. What do you do? Do you walk over and pull them out or bend them over…or do you take the picture and then clone them out in Photoshop when you get back to uncivilization?

This sort of bumps into that related theme of what constitutes a “manipulated” photograph. In order to nip that discussion in the butt, lets just all agree that EVERY photograph is manipulated. It is NOT reality you are recreating in that little square or rectangle. It is your interpretation of reality…you choose the viewpoint, the lens, the f-stop, the focus point, the exposure, the post-processing techniques. Even photographing the exact same scene, all photographers will necessarily come up with very different images because of their individual choices with these and other variables.

So, what about that nuisance weed? What to do…what to do…? The purists among us will leave it, or maybe move to a different angle that does not include the offending flora. Others (and I include me, myself and I in this group) will move the weed if we notice it and, if it does happen to escape our intensive camera frame “border patrol”, then we will eliminate it later with the clone tool. I don’t feel at all bad about doing this since I am trying to create something akin to art, not a crime scene documentary photograph. (Rest assured, I do stop short of chain-sawing down trees or dynamiting wrongly-placed boulders to get the shot, though.)

The above image (a repeat from a previous post) is a great example. I was so enamored with the water, the clouds, the Moon, that I didn’t notice the TV antenna-shaped weed in the bottom right corner. Now that you see it, doesn’t it bother the Hades out of you? If I had seen it while shooting, I would have removed the two blades immediately. I didn’t see the problem, though, until I was back home looking at the image in the computer screen. I thought the picture would be much better without this distraction, so–zap!–gone with the wind and a whole lot of detailed mouse clicks.

Here is the result (converted to monochrome) and it feels so much better without that stupid TV antenna in the foreground:

Moonrise, Firehole River. Yellowstone NP, Wyoming, 2013