The Great Photoshop Controversy!

Kingstone Coombes, near Ashbury, Oxon. Reported 9th June 2011. Barley

The crop circle at Kingstone Coombes was an interesting one. It looked like a younger sibling of the Hackpen Hill circle (see my last blog). It was similar in design, a central circle with three equally spaced circles, this time containing the same design. However, its form was uneven and its geometry was imperfect. The arm on the right of picture (a) is not the same as the other two.

Normally I would make a sketch, idealising the shape as I go. I do this in the service of better understanding the geometry. I have described this as an act of healing, which I think it can be, especially, as when the season seems to be presenting us with a number of ‘broken’ crop circles.

However (and despite everything I said in my last blog), this time I thought I’d try something different. I am nothing if not a playful soul, so I thought I would Photoshop one of Steve’s images instead, to see what the circle might have looked like in the field had the geometry been perfect.

My manipulated image was in no way a comment upon the original formation. To me, when I worked on it, it was in the same spirit as drawing the circle on paper and idealising the geometry to get of better understanding the formation. Nor was the image an attempt to fool people. It will not end up in a book, or calendar pretending to be a picture of a real crop circle – that would quite clearly be wrong.

When I was finished, I posted the image on the internet to share it with everyone else – picture (b). When I did this, I made it very clear that this is what I had done and that the picture was a ‘curiosity’. Steve had already posted images showing the formation as it actually looked, so I thought (rather naively as it turned out) that people might be interested to see my image. To be fair, some were interested and liked the image. But to my total surprise some people were uneasy that I had done this. Naturally I was immediately interested by this second unexpected response.

I think this unease fell broadly into three categories. The first was that people were concerned that anyone knew what the circle ‘should’ have looked like. I have to say I largely agree with this sentiment. A crop circle is as it appears in the field and we know nothing more. Secondly, it also opened up the question of how much digital manipulation is acceptable in crop circle photography and how much is routinely applied to images. And thirdly, there was an almost imperceptible anxiety that lay beneath the words of those who had commented on my image – clearly there was something in the unconscious at work here…

These days, our photography is done with digital cameras. Long gone are the romantic days of the clunking medium format film camera and the salad-box in the fridge being perpetually full of brightly packaged rolls of 120 film! In those days photographers used neutral density filters, polarisers and other such equipment to get the best image they could. However, in the world of modern digital photography things have changed a lot.

Steve shoots RAW images onto the camera, using the settings that best suit the photographic environment. These images are then ‘finished’ on the computer using photographic software.

Contrast and brightness, colour balance and sharpness are the basics. Think of it like the EQ on your stereo – you manually balance the various channels to get the best sound. This is exactly the same principal. You can tweak the exposure and correct colours, which are not always captured accurately by digital cameras. Digital sharpening won’t make a blurred photo sharp, but it will enhance the overall definition of a picture.

We, like many other circle photographers, remove walk lines from crop circle pictures. This is where visitors have walked across the field, rather than the tractor-lines to reach the circle. They can look ugly and can distract from the circle itself. I have also from time to time removed unsightly imperfections in the fields – animal damage etc.

You might also remove any ‘digital artefacts’ you get on the picture – blobs etc – recorded by the camera. I have removed lens flare from the ‘odd’ image – but the golden rule is that you don’t alter the crop circle in anyway.

I don’t think anyone involved in recording the circles would do this, unless they were doing something like I did with the Kingstone Coombes formation, and then they would make it clear, as I did, what had been done. The idea that anyone would alter the circles in their photos to make them look better is unthinkable. Many of the circles are pretty much perfect anyway – they don’t need to be altered!

I once had someone tell me that they thought that we had created all the circles (in the pictures I was showing during a talk) using Photoshop. Clearly this is not true either! I gently pointed out that we were not the only ones to photograph these particular circles.

Even with all the technology available to us, the transparencies we used to get from our old medium-format camera are still superior in definition to almost all but the high-end digital cameras available these days. But getting the film processed takes time, many professional processing labs simply closed-down in response to the new digital age – which means going a long way to find a lab that does E6 processing. Getting film developed now is just too time consuming and costly, so we don’t use it anymore. It’s a shame, I liked the alchemy of processing film – all those pictures emerging as if by magic from trays full of mysterious chemicals in a laboratory…

Good photo finishing will not transform a bad photo into a good one, as my mother says “you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear”. But it just helps you get that little bit more from a good raw image – it ‘finishes’ it off; like polishing up your shoes before going out. How much ‘finishing’ you do depends on your taste and on your ability with the software. Too much can look like a bad face-lift, too little can leave a photo dull and lifeless. It’s a matter of taste.

With all good photography getting the basics right – exposure, shutter speed and focusing is key – they are the basic skills of the trade. But as any good photographer will tell you ‘composition is king’. The rest is just spit and polish.

After my experience with the Photoshop image I decided to go back to the drawing board and make my usual hand drawn sketch. As I drew I thought about that third category of response to the picture, that almost imperceptible anxiety that lay beneath the words of those who had commented on my image.

I think what this episode has taught me is that in idealising the geometry of a crop circle in a photograph, rather than a drawing, I had almost made it real. Too real. Clearly it is an acceptable part of crop circle enquiry to make a drawing (or diagram) of a formation and in the process to idealise non-perfect geometry to better understand the formation – this is done routinely, and to general approval. But to do it with a photo was a step too far, it made the un-manifest ideal, manifest – and in doing so I was in imminent danger of inadvertently changing reality!

KAREN ALEXANDER – JULY 1, 2011