Burned highlights / Black shadows

[daveleo]

I am noticing more and more that many artists (painters) include (what we would call) "burned highlights" in their pictures. Flipping through a few books just before, I'd say a majority of "outdoor" paintings show areas of burned highlights.
I notice though that totally black shadows are rare . . . painters seem to keep shadow details more that highlight details.

So, I am wondering . . . is the "burned highlights" taboo a social or digital age prejudice that we have? Is it just something that became important when people noticed that digital cameras tended to burn the highlights, so that must be bad?

I find that I don't mind looking at these pictures, but when I am making pictures, I am careful not to loose highlight detail (because I think it's a "rule" ?)

Anyway . . . why is it okay for paintings and generally not okay for photographs?

[Sparrow]

Personally, I don't mind blocked shadows but do find blown highlights distracting

[Nikkor AIS]

Burned highlights are one of the reasons I am getting out of shooting digtial.





Gregory

[konicaman]

Burned highlights are annoying and from a psychological perspective distracting as well (the eye is usually drawn to lightest part of a photo). Digital shots should IMHO be exposed like slide film - for the highlights, and yes, that leaves you with blocked shadows. Still it is easier to extract details from dark shadows than from burned highlights, if you so want. So in my book burned highlights are still taboo.

[dave lackey]

Dave, the short answer is it depends.

Art, photography included, is all subjective. I may like a film noir style, you may like grey tones. Each to his/her own but no one should diss anyone else, IMO. Besides, where would contre jour be without blown highlights in a few cases?

[elude]

It's okay for photographers : for instance Trent Parke among other is doing a tremendous job.
On another forum, summilux (french Leica forum) we have opened a thread about it with the works of artists we've discovered etc. It's fifteen pages long and really, really interesting.

[mfogiel]

Maybe these "artists" are copying their own Iphone digital shots, LOL...

[daveleo]

First . . . @elude : thank you for that link. The stuff I looked at was very intriguing and inspiring, and (more and more) I love the stuff that has "an edge". I bookmarked it and will be back there for more inspiration.

Personally, I've seen all the pretty landscapes and "gritty" street scenes I need to see in my life (maybe you haven't but I have), now I want to see some new things ("new" for me, maybe for others it's old stuff). I don't care if it's a pencil sketch in a Moleskine, or a $20,000 camera image or made by some 3 year old with crayons . . . if I like it, I like it.

Back to my original question . . . I notice that burned highlights have been used for centuries by artists to convey various feelings about the scene. Lately I am waking up to this effect in my photo images, and I notice that I treat burned highlights like the plague, because "nobody likes burned highlights in a picture". But, as Dave Lackey noted . . . "it depends".

Too silly, I think for me, and I am thinking it's time for me to burn out highlights when they need burning, and let the critics go about their work.

Hopefully this is not the end of the conversation here. I think it's a good effect to understand and explore.

@ konicaman . . . I am saying "don't extract the details" . . . leave them burned. Painters do it, why can't a photographer?

[paulfish4570]

our eyes suffer glare and blow highlights all the time; they block shadows, too, soon after after blowing highlights. it is no big deal for me, although i typically expose for highlights more often than not. i like some deepness to shadows ...

[JoeV]

Originally Posted by daveleo

I am noticing more and more that many artists (painters) include (what we would call) "burned highlights" in their pictures. Flipping through a few books just before, I'd say a majority of "outdoor" paintings show areas of burned highlights.
I notice though that totally black shadows are rare . . . painters seem to keep shadow details more that highlight details.

So, I am wondering . . . is the "burned highlights" taboo a social or digital age prejudice that we have? Is it just something that became important when people noticed that digital cameras tended to burn the highlights, so that must be bad?

I find that I don't mind looking at these pictures, but when I am making pictures, I am careful not to loose highlight detail (because I think it's a "rule" ?)

Anyway . . . why is it okay for paintings and generally not okay for photographs?

It 's possible that many of these painters are not painting in "plein air" style, but are painting from photographs ... and the photographs themselves have blown highlights.

I've seen paintings hanging in galleries that were obviously painted from photos, they included shallow depth of field effects that the human eye just doesn't notice if one were painting live at the scene.

~Joe

[kennylovrin]

For me, while I do try to avoid to burn highlights, it's not so much about blowing them out itself, but rather the way digital cameras has a tendency to transition from very light to blown highlights. To my eye it often looks like that transition is smooth up to just shy of pure white, then jumps into pure white that very last bit. And to me that looks kind of ****.

That is actually a very real reason why I tend to prefer full frame cameras, because they seem to handle that transition a bit smoother and more predictable, and it's also the main reason why I often can barely stand mobile or p&s shots. They "always" look like the just go straight from medium gray into pure white in one step.

Obviously there are exceptions, but to my eye this is kind of how it looks.

[daveleo]

@JoeV . . . no one could argue with your first remark . . . we'd have to identify what paintings were certainly made from photos and which ones weren't and that's probably not possible. I understand your second statement but a painter may have learned the DOF "trick" from a few photographs and later applied it to paintings made in "plein air".
I don't know one way or the other, but it's stuff to think about. Still doesn't explain why it's okay for great paintings but not okay for my pictures, you know? . . . I am imagining that an artist paints a copy of a photo with blown highlights. The painting becomes a classic, and the photo gets canned because the highlights are burned out . . . go figure, huh?

@kennylovrin . . . very interesting observation. I will have to pay attention to that effect.

[Morca007]

The only reason it's not "okay" for your pictures is that you do not like them. Perhaps you are looking at your photographs with a technical rather than an aesthetic eye, do you often give your work some distance before re-appraising it? A great deal of successful photography makes use of radically compressed highlight and shadow, one need look no further than Moriyama to see it used well.

[BlackXList]

Obviously it's tough to make blanket comments without viewing specific pieces, be they paintings or photographs, so my comments on this are soley in as much as it applies to my own shooting.

I shoot in abandoned buildings from time to time, and that often leads to situations where the light could charitably be described as "challenging" my personal approach to it is to capture what's inside the room, and allow the windows (often the only light source) to blow out not only because it illuminates the room enough to see what's in there, but also because it removes any external information or context from the room, and to me that's just another way of visually representing how the building/room is divorced from it's original context or purpose.

It also has the effect of making the place feel very isolated, which is usually a feeling that you get being in there, and although I didn't have it in mind when I started shooting that way, I was very interested to see that when he was shooting "The Shining" Kubrick had huge banks of floodlights positioned outside the windows in order to blow them out and add to the feeling of isolation.

I'm not claiming Kubrickian levels of genius in any way, I just find it interesting that in his case a deliberate decision to break a photographic "rule" and in mine, an employment of what is usually seen as a technical limitation of a piece of equipment can be used in a deliberate way to add to creating a (hopefully) effective image.