I do agree that appreciation for a beautiful image is paramount, and there are some beautiful images, like Ansel's that are a testimony of his and others' amazing skill in the darkroom. But, there were a relatively small number of things that could be done with a photograph back then. Filters, burning, dodging, diffusion, developing for greater/less contrast... solutions for treatment of small portions of photographs...but, I don't see the modern computer jockey as much more than a coloring book or paint by numbers person rather than a true artist/photographer.

I have an example of postprocessing using sky replacement. I believe it is justified, even though I did not supply the sky images. (I did disclose it anyway for reasons shown below).

In 2020 my wife's daughter and her boyfriend decided to get married. They wanted the wedding to be on the east coast where most of the family was located. But they lived in Colorado. So the 'rents got the job of selecting a venue. They are into golf so their first suggestion was a golf course they liked.

So we went to the golf course and took some photographs, concentrating on the facility and the restaurants. In our opinion the facilities were not up to a wedding and the restaurants were kind of dark and the decor was outdated. So we told them so. They were not happy. We then looked at a couple other venues. One of them was OK but not great. Another looked pretty good to us. But the kids rejected it. They were looking for a vacation place and this place was quiet and too far out in the sticks. Great for us old guys but not meeting specs for young people.

So we started looking a bit further away. Found a highly rated venue that turned out to be a tent on a dock in a harbor. The town nearby was full of young peoples places but the venue was seriously lacking.

Finally went online and my wife found a place that was rated #5 on the east coast for a wedding venue so we went to see it. It was a 3.5 hour drive each way. Our schedule is not all that open so we scheduled a date and arranged with the venue to take a tour. On the appointed day the weather was overcast. The venue was everything everyone was looking for. The weather was not. But I took photos anyway and made a web page to show them what it was like. Naturally I wanted to sell the venue to them because we were getting weary of driving all over the place trying to find a spot. So I replaced the overcast skies with something better. Photoshop had just recently come out with sky replacement (it wasn't all that hard before but it became easier now). Even though I had taken a few skies on the farm just in case I needed them I just used the canned sky examples included with Photoshop. Examples below.

This example shows the lawn where they hold wedding ceremonies, weather permitting.


This example shows the weather when we visited (admittedly an extreme example -- the sun never came out but it wasn't always this foggy.


So on the web page I included the actual weather with a caveat that this is what happens sometimes.

So they picked a date (mid May) and started in on all the other preparations. About a month before the wedding we started looking at weather forecasts. They included rain. At 3 weeks out, rain forecast. At 2 weeks out, rain forecast. At 1 week out, rain forecast. On the day of the wedding it was 65F and sunny. For the month after the wedding, they had rain every weekend.

All because I replaced the skies.

Good question, but not in my opinion. Adding clouds that were not there at that particular point of time does not change the location’s scene. Some add a tree or flowers. I have seen plenty of “fine art” images that use significant editing that mention nothing of editing changes even if composited. This will be a long discussion with the increased use of AI where zero photography is sometimes used. Everyone shooting in raw will edit any many using various filters to give the image the feeling they were going for - but it definitely “didn’t look like that with your eyes”. Maybe we don’t call it photography but digital photography or similar.

I do agree that appreciation for a beautiful image is paramount, and there are some beautiful images, like Ansel's that are a testimony of his and others' amazing skill in the darkroom. But, there were a relatively small number of things that could be done with a photograph back then. Filters, burning, dodging, diffusion, developing for greater/less contrast... solutions for treatment of small portions of photographs...but, I don't see the modern computer jockey as much more than a coloring book or paint by numbers person rather than a true artist/photographer.

I’ve really enjoyed the discussion about the ethics of photo alteration, a subject that gets more fraught with every new addition of Photoshop. Remarkably, though feelings are strong—and justifiably so-- the discussion has been (mostly) respectful and as always I particularly enjoy the wisdom of Bill Burkholder, clearly a guy who has paid his dues.

Surely, we have lost something of value. From the beginning, photography had an aura of “truth”, and most of us, most of the time, have thought seeing a photo was believing. Now, “staging” of pics was always available: the iconic WWII picture of the Marines planting the flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima? Reenacted a few moments later with a more glorious flag (though the battle was still going on). The famous Ruth Orkin picture “An American Girl in Italy” showing a group of Italian men harassing a beautiful girl, actually went like this: (quote from British Vogue) “… As Orkin strode towards the Piazza della Repubblica, she turned back to see Jinx (Craig) squirm as she made her way through a chorus of men. She told her to backtrack and do it more confidently…” Well, the men still behaved badly, but knowing that these moments were reenacted diminishes our appreciation of both pictures a bit, because they were not really of “the moment.”

By now we have learned not to trust pictures at all. It is sad! Remember when TV Guide did a cover story on Oprah Winfrey’s wonderful diet and put her head on Ann-margaret’s body? And they didn’t ask either woman’s permission. Of course “Photoshopping” can be used to make very ugly lies, and God knows AI will allow the lies to be as bad as the worst of us can imagine. But the incredible digital capability we have to just re-imagine an image also adds a huge creative dimension to imagemaking that is, frankly, just a whole lot of fun. Some examples are attached below. Again: motive is everything!

Anyway,capturing the moment is still a unique glory of SOOC photography: