[NT73]

Matthew ----- You would make a good politician. They never tell lies. Just bend or withhold the truth somewhat.
"Post-Capture Optimization."

[essaljay]

does that mean you also believe in fairies and six-foot chickens? They were also presented as real by our predecessors. I think the only politician round here is the one that has to name-drop god to try and prove a point.

[NT73]

Of course I do. An ostrich is a 6 foot chicken aint it, and we are not allowed to speak of the fairies (They are legal now)
I was not having a pop at you or your image but at image manipulation in general.
There is room for it but in my opinion it is more to do with art and imagination than photography.

[EnglishBob]

If the old pioneers of photography had/have taken the same liberties with their photo's, then who's past are we looking at? Ours or a photographers imagination.
Remember photos of such as (Jesse James, Doc Halliday, The Alamo, Queen Victoria, Old buildings such as Buckingham palace in the 1800's.) What if they had bits cloned out and trees added?
What have we been looking at?
That is what I mean by manipulation.
'Morals' was not aimed at your particular photo, as I said in an earlier post 'It depends what the photo is for.'
I just dont believe it is right to call it PP as opposed to manipulation.(or whatever other term you would like to use).

Unfortunately they did, with dodging, burning and even as far as having paint applied to negatives. Double exposures, negative splicing. Informal portraits usually had the backgrounds painted out in the darkroom.

My Camera Club has been around since 1891, and in the minutes of meetings going back to the very early 1900's, there appear a lot of discussion on what was legal in the darkroom... arguments almost identical to a lot of the photoshop debates today.

Another Parallel is the new fangled "color slide" versus the black and white darkroom debate...smacks of digital versus film in almost every aspect. Not a new topic, just new ways of doing it.

In Photograpic Society of America competitions they have 4 divisions and each has different limits.
Pictorial - Anything goes.
Nature, Photojournalism and Travel - All allow minor corrections for color and exposure, you can also Crop, rotate and flip a picture (reverse it). Not allowed is cloning, combining, moving and removing of any element.