8th-snype posted:

any of those borders are too much

Choicecut posted:

Hyperspace Mountain

SMERSH Mouth posted:

I think it's something like...

Actual white matte board around your printed photo: OK

White border on your basic atrocity Instagram post: dgaf it's IG

White border on your 'good' online pictures: no

.. Although, I have wondered about using it at times, as a way to get Flickr photos to display properly across both high- and low-PPI monitors. Basically, keeping the photo small enough that it won't blow up to near 100% magnification on retina displays and the like, but also making the image area larger than the bounds of an average HD monitor... Because somehow images on Flickr look softer if they don't exceed the size of the monitor along one axis or another when zoomed-in. Or at least that's how it is on my MacBook Air.

Right now I just ignore the existence of retina displays when exporting my full-size jpegs to Flickr.

(Also I like your first photo.)

p0stal b0b posted:

Is it a borders in general thing, or just "art" borders?

Choicecut posted:

Hyperspace Mountain

p0stal b0b posted:

Is it a borders in general thing, or just "art" borders?

RangerScum posted:

Putting borders around online digital pics is usually a weird self-fellation whereby the author is loudly proclaiming that they believe their photograph is "art."

elgarbo posted:

What about when combined with a carefully crafted watermark?

elgarbo posted:

What about when combined with a carefully crafted watermark?

Wild EEPROM posted:

what if you have the film borders but then you also add sharp crisp white and then black border around that, just to set it off from the background?

p0stal b0b posted:

Opinions on borders on printed & hung photos: same as above? I'll stop cluttering up the thread now, thanks.

mAlfunkti0n posted:

Went backpacking, saw trees, saw clouds, became sore.

untitled-5.jpg by jarredsutherland, on Flickr

Choicecut posted:

Dread Head posted:

Straightening your horizon may not make this a more exciting image but you should do so anyways.

thetzar posted:

My opinion which no-one asked for is basically this: Film edge borders get lumped in with sepia toning, grunge brushes, duotoning and other effects as "easy ways to make a photo look like something it isn't."

I loving LOVE the look of Polaroid Type 55. That look tends to tie together a number of things: (usually) a shallow depth of field due to being shot on large format, rich black and white contrasts, a deliberate touch to the photograph due to the trouble of shooting it, and of course those off-the-hook edges. Now, shy of selling a kidney to buy out remaining Type 55 stock and waste it (or trust the nascent New55 project), there are things I can do to bring aspects of that work into my work. I can shoot fast glass, I can process for contrast, I can slow the gently caress down and think about what I'm shooting. But when I load up a PSD of someone's scanned Type 55 borders and slap it onto my photo, I cross a line in my head between "making my pictures contrasty/intense" and "making my photos look like something they are not."

And hell, I've been there. Go far enough back on my Flickr timeline, past the actual medium-formal film borders I flirted with briefly, and you'll find the fake stuff: the photoshopped dirt and tears, the edge effects, the fake light leaks. I did it, and then I stopped doing it. Partially because it's so easy to do that once I'd done it, I realized it adds no value. But mostly because that's not what I wanted to make.

If I was purely an aesthete, I'd say, sure, what the gently caress. Pixels have no truth, so I'll just make something that looks good. But I'm trying to do something a little more interesting (to me) with my photography. Not that I don't think that heavy editing is a fine and worthwhile thing: I think all of those Russian girls photoshopping themselves in long dresses hovering over lakes holding umbrellas and whatnot are doing some lovely work. I wish I knew how they were doing some of that. But it's not for me. At least not right now. And when I do edit something heavily, I do it to try and make it something new and interesting (to me), instead of making my photograph/whatever look like it's something it isn't.

Film borders look great, use them in film if you want. Sepia toning looks great, use it if you do the process. Digital photography can fake all of that easily. Do you want to do something that easy? If yes, great, do it and hang it up in your house and smile at it. If not, find something harder to do.

/rant



Edit: I might be able to boil it down to this for myself: Don't disappoint your audience. If you use a film edge and someone asks, "wow, you shot that on film?" and you shyly say no, they might be disappointed. If you give a poo poo about that, don't do it.

ansel autisms posted:

you're talking as if photography has the tiniest sliver of "authenticity" to it.

Wafflecopper posted:

What do you mean by this? To me it seems a lot more authentic than say painting, where you can paint whatever the gently caress you like and it doesn't have to remotely match reality.

VelociBacon posted:

At least in painting what the artist had applied to the canvas is what the viewer is to appreciate. There's no way to adjust a painting without applying paint/oil with a tool by the artist. Even in paintings which are initially done almost greyscale and then color is selectively applied as a glaze to certain areas, what you're seeing is the direct intention of the artist at the time of the painting; that is to say there's no way for me to paint a portrait in my style (garbage) and then select a filter to make it look like renaissance era artwork. With photoshop I can shoot a DSLR portrait and then sepia/add film borders/VSCO/etc to make it falsely evocative of something the shot is not.