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+1,

Digital photography has just expanded the possibilities.

I wonder whether Walkeja is having us on a bit here. Playing devils advocate perhaps?

I have a friend who reckons that Post Processing on a computer is cheating- he takes all of his shots in AUTO and has his jpegs printed by his local London Camera Exchange!

When we both took shots of the same scene his sky was blown out white and mine full of fluffy grey clouds- he couldnt understand how. When I told him it was just a more controlled exposure and a tweak of exp comp, followed by a tweak in Lightroom he said that it was cheating!

I felt like Blackadder to his Baldrick

The original meaning of the word Photography isn't strictly true, even with film we didn't "draw with light" we simply allowed the light to fall onto a light sensitive emulsion, we do exactly the same with a digital sensor.

How much manipulation is done to either is a matter of personal choice, as JR says in the days of the darkroom images were still manipulated, even incorporating elements from several images and combining them into one Today it's just a lot easier to do in photoshop etc.

Is it unfair that someone should strive to get the image right in camera only to be beaten in a competition by a heavily manipulated image? well that did apply to images shot on film too, even transparencies could be manipulated by sandwiching two or more slides together.

It is extremely annoying though, I've seen otherwise rather mundane images win competitions simply with the application of an artistic filter, when digital photography first took off someone coined the acronym GIGA garbage in garbage out, which in essence is no longer true.

Walkeja, whether English, Russian or 'Pekingnese'is, after all entitled to his own opinion. Exactly as we all are. His comments are certainly not extreme. Possibly 'enhanced' shall we say by some of the previous comments.

We, again all of us are free to either: -

1. Take and use the image straight out of the camera, or
2. Digitally alter, enhance/whatever through any programme via the computer.

I wonder if using colour is cheating? After all light isn't really coloured - our eyes just interpret it that way!

I had a friend who was once outraged that I could crop images in the darkroom. He said it wasn't fair on "the rest of us" but then , he did have the choice to set up a darkroom as well.

However, before I had a darkroom I ordered a print larger than I wanted and then cut it to suit. Was that unfair too?

Colour is simply light made up of differing wavelengths and frequencies. The 'Visible' spectrum, as we see it consists of the old adage'- Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain: -

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue Indigo and Violet.

Light is basically just a form of Energy.

What I should also have said is that 'light is just one form of energy that we can actually see that is made up from photons'Therefore colour is actually light, simply in various forms that we see/perceive.

We are all surrounded by electromagnetic waves of energy of which colour is just a small part.

And what we see is then interpreted by our mind, shaped by our knowledge and experiences to produce an image. So the final manipulation happens in our subconscious.

No photograph is ever a true representation of anything.

Ever shown a cat a photograph of a mouse? No reaction. None. Nada.

Our cat has only ever once shown any interest in two dimensional images. One day she watched, avidly, an entire hour of nature programme. Nothing before or since, so who knows how the feline mind works.

Despite having lived alongside a few cats I haven't much idea how their mind and eyes work but I do know a little bit about dogs. Show them a photograph and that is precisley what they see, a piece of paper, a screen or even a slide with coloured marks on it. Show them a cartoon dog on TV and they dont react but they do react to film of a real dog because they are tuned to recognising movement patterns

Drawing with light.

The image produced by my camera (jpegs) are as I remembered the scene.
So, how did you "sharpen" an image in the darkroom?

All the best

Do you really have nothing better to do than to come onto this forum and argue with everyone?

Why don't you go and find a forum where nobody uses a digital camera? Or even better, since you think we shouldn't be using computers to show photographs because they are no longer photographs(???) find a local club where all the members are over 70 and who don't like new fangled things like film on reels?

I agree that a dog will react to a moving image, but it wouldn't recognise a video of a dog as a dog.

Although I do have a sneaking suspicion that my cat is much smarter than she lets on!

ALL cats are smarter than they let on