As much as I love photography, I have found it to be the most frustrating art form. Because it’s the only one that aims to perfectly duplicate reality, not just represent it in a different way. Paintings can be abstract or realistic, but they are meant to be a representation. Music is always an interpretation, filtered through one’s perception. But photographs, in theory, can reproduce a moment. In theory. But in reality, of course failure is inevitable. Even if you capture the beauty of a colorful butterfly resting on a flower, you won’t smell the flower in the picture; you won’t feel the sun or the breeze of that day; you won’t remember the exact thoughts running through your mind as you snapped the shutter. But it’s about as close as you can come to permanently capturing an image aside from memory - and memory, though more vivid, is far more fragile than paper or bits on a hard drive. And yet, in traditional photography, no matter how well done, you cannot capture everything the naked eye captures; it’s just not physically possible. And I guess that’s why I love HDR photography so much - both schools of it. Because realistic HDR gets as close to capturing the way a human eye captures an image as is currently possible. And unrealistic, or heavily tone-mapped or however you want to call it HDR has become an art form in itself, making photographic visions only seen before in dreams possible.

As much as I love photography, I have found it to be the most frustrating art form. Because it’s the only one that aims to perfectly duplicate reality, not just represent it in a different way. Paintings can be abstract or realistic, but they are meant to be a representation. Music is always an interpretation, filtered through one’s perception. But photographs, in theory, can reproduce a moment. In theory.

But in reality, of course failure is inevitable. Even if you capture the beauty of a colorful butterfly resting on a flower, you won’t smell the flower in the picture; you won’t feel the sun or the breeze of that day; you won’t remember the exact thoughts running through your mind as you snapped the shutter. But it’s about as close as you can come to permanently capturing an image aside from memory - and memory, though more vivid, is far more fragile than paper or bits on a hard drive.

And yet, in traditional photography, no matter how well done, you cannot capture everything the naked eye captures; it’s just not physically possible. And I guess that’s why I love HDR photography so much - both schools of it. Because realistic HDR gets as close to capturing the way a human eye captures an image as is currently possible. And unrealistic, or heavily tone-mapped or however you want to call it HDR has become an art form in itself, making photographic visions only seen before in dreams possible.