Slightly OFF Topic..when does it stop becoming photography and become post processed 'art'?

"frederick" wrote in message
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Pete D wrote:
"frederick" wrote in message
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the_niner_nation wrote:
"frederick" wrote in message
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Pete D wrote:
This is easy.

A photograph is what you take with any camera and then do a direct
print, this is a photograph.

Anything else is simply not a photography, it will be a digitally
altered image.
Agree 100%.

BTW, what sharpening, white balance, and saturation settings should I
apply to best achieve this?

Would it be cheating to set the exposure time to freeze or allow
motion blur to be used as a feature, or use the aperture settings to
control DOF?

Would shooting in monochrome be cheating?

Would correcting distortion be cheating? What about perspective - can
I use a PC lens? Should I use rectilinear corrected lenses or
fish-eyes? Can I even use different focal lengths?

I think that the only way to avoid cheating with a dslr is to fit it
with a standard prime lens, then glue your camera mode dial to "P",
smash the pop-up flash off if it has one, and thenceforth only ever
use the shutter button.
the changes you are referring to dont actually distract from the
'ethicical' spirit of your photograph..it's not like you are pinching
the sky from an arizona desert landscape to make up for blown
highlights you got from a waterfall in the lake district ..
So is it ethical to use a large aperture to obscure/blur out something
in the background - something really was there, but not ethical to do
the same using pp techniques?

IMO the "ethical spirit" is mainly crud. The "legal spirit" matters if
you're taking forensic photos and can apply to photos used as records,
journalism etc, but I can also think of perfectly legitimate uses of
digital pp for those - that are also entirely ethical.

As for photography as an art, then IMO any criticism of pp is precious
crock, probably purveyed mainly by luddites and other fixer-sniffers who
don't know how to use a computer.

I think you have missed the point here, pretty much every image we as
photographers print up these days are digital images, not photographs.
Never did I say anything about ethics etc, I simply said basicly print
from the camera and that is a photograph, do more than that and it is a
digital image, whatever you want to do is fine by me, you have to look at
it.
Rubbish.
Even while I type this, I'm looking at a photo of my Great Grandmother and
Grandmother taken in about 1895, and probably more heavily altered than
many people typically do with digital, but I doubt that anyone over the
past 112 years has ever even questioned the purity of that image as a
"photograph".


would you at least conceed that today's digital photographer has far more
sophisticated and easier to apply post processing tools than the guy who
took the photograph of your great grand parents?

My point was that I find it odd that an image that has been processed to
such a level that it is totally isolated form the gravity of it's 'original'
elements can be passed off as photography...art is art, photography is also
art....perhaps we should consider those with very high and sophisticated
levels of post processing skills 'artists', too?



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