I 'd this because it's my favourite style of photography: extreme black and white. Also, you look like a fun person to know (gotta love the jacket!)

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ha thank you very much. yes yes theres a Serious lack of that kinda look, something about bleaching out highlights and shadow details and essentially creating this raw, crudely formed image just fascinates me. plus it gives the image this great charismatic appeal, what you-is-what-you-get and there's no prancing around in photoshop or the like perfecting everything so much that the raw creativity, flair, life, zest etc. is just lost. we've fast entered the age where every image is inherently faulty if it hasn't had a post-processing, its just 'Not Right' because it hasn't been sharpened, polished, corrected and adjusted like some factory production line. hence i am thus now a straight (ish) photographer yes yes as in as maximum portrayal of what you, the artist saw in the Beginning. i do not judge others who have used and use photoshop that'd be a strange thing to do.

I've totally stopped using photoshop, and its helped me so much as a artist due to that simple little leap, the fact that you know you cannot change anything changes everything. down to the smallest details. its incredible the different vantage point i now have because of it. - obviously this photograph went through photoshop (it is also before i changed my views), but i regard nearly all photographs which have undergone heavy photoshopping now as graphics; rather than photographs.

anyhow too much writing yes its a common mistake i make i think due to the fact i read quite quick, seems to effect the length of my writings.

thank you im flattered, yes its my sort of pyjama jacket, i wear it every day (when needed) like some kind of cartoon character.

I don't mind lenghty, I'm always up for a good talk. So don't worry
About the photoshop thing you mentioned... I also think that if you process a photograph too much (which I often did myself *shameonme*) it seizes to be a photograph and should be called a manipulation. Changes like saturation, lighting etc. made in ps don't take the photo-quality away, in my opinion. Because sometimes you don't have that much equipment and the lighting is really bad, and then you're glad that you can tweak that a little in photoshop. But then, some pictures are sooo overprocessed (with liquify and what-have-you), that they start looking totally digital. So nowadays, when people see these perfect digital paintings and go: oh my god, I though it was a photo! I don't think it's only because the digital artists get better, but also because photographers tend to become more "digital", if you know what I mean. Sometimes it's not that bad if you can see pores on the pic, the skin doesn't always have to super-smooth etc.
haha, pyjama jacket *lol*

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come visit my gallery [link]

oh ok good
yeah i think people are giving themselves and others an excuse for making decent photographs into well done photographs through photoshop/gimp, while in actuality they are simply ignoring the fact that they are really ending up creating 'hoto manipulations'/graphics. yes i do think its a easy trap to fall into, but it doesn't help you at all to seriously grow, mature and eventually evolve your style, i think you end up in a cycle of decent but slightly mundane work - you end up thinking more of what you could do after taking the photograph, then what you could and should be doing before taking the photograph; to the best of your ability.

im not sure about the concept of straight/purist photography in general, i know for certain that is not possible to Not manipulate your work as a photographer in all cases, because your manipulating the image simply by changing apertures/shutter speeds. And so i think in extreme cases i would perhaps use photoshop to Correct the lighting/saturation as you say.

ha yes soon in 5-10 years or something we'll all be hearing of the 35mm film revival, due to peoples shocked realisations that everything has turned absolutely digital.

i agree photoshopping can yield original results a significant amount of the time. a lot of the time i do crave taking some more images in film, my digital work starts to scream 'stock photography stock photography stock photography' at me and i recoil in horror (i have this strange & irrational phobia of suddenly looking at all my work and realising it has that stock photography look) and i just have to avoid digital for a while.

the stereotypical anal cleanliness of digital photography(& photographers) and the photoshop-lover associations gets to me everynow and again. (way over-generalisation but yes.)

"stereotypical anal cleanliness" you just made me laugh out loud
That stock photography phobia you have? I have that, too! I'm always afraid that my pictures aren't real art, but mere art stock. When browsing through deviantart's stock gallery, I sometimes see stock that is so overwhemingly awesome that I begin to fear that this "imperfect" stock is in reality so much better than my so-called "perfect art" photograph. Or that myabe it would look just the same as mine if run through a few ps changes With which we're at the ps/digital thing again. You know, I like looking at perfect beautiful faces as much as the next person (we can't help it, it's biological) but I think you can only really like a person if you see all its imperfections, see trough them and still like the person. So these made-perfect-in-ps faces have no personality for me, which for me is the most important thing behind a portrait.
So yay for the 35mm film revival (although I'm really bad at shooting with film...)

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come visit my gallery [link]

yes another strange word string from twilightkerouac ha great

i think it really depends on how you define art-stock. what the purpose of the art is really changes things, no matter how the art looks like. yes but there is a incredibly large difference between great technical skills and artistic skills, creativity, concepts etc..

yes i agree. the most powerful photographs for me have the most imperfections. Robert Franks Storylines changed me as an artist, and you could say his speciality was imperfections; even though he didn't ever really do that many portraits. ha yeah, its very daunting but so much easier than it first seems.