And what law of photography prohibits manipulation?
I don't disagree with a word you say Mark, BUT...
When you run a 'Landscape Photography' competition, then surely the title of the contest suggests the images should represent a definable landscape and not an illusionary landscape?
If I were to clone a large oak tree in full leaf, growing out of the top of Mount Everest, would that be allowed into this particular 'Landscape Photography' competition? I think it probably wouldn't be, or how about Saturn with all its rings hovering 20ft over my back garden? So again I imagine this type of work would be thrown out and found to be unacceptable to the competition organiser, not to mention the other competitors. So to say that anything goes and it is OK, is not really true is it? Because even the person running this contest will have his limits.
So the question then becomes, if we are going to have limits (for competitions at least), then surely it should be an industry agreed standard type of limit and not what an organiser, who is being paid and deems to be acceptable on any given day, chooses to allow..
If anyone wants to put their work into a photography competition, then put your work into the
WorldPhoto.org. It's free (yes FREE) and the prize values are about the same and it is also being run by recognised industry representatives from Sony - and if you are selected as a winner, then you may be asked to show them the RAW file the image came from.
Did you also know, that in a large competition and especially a fee paying competition of $25 per shot like this one is, that what you get for you money, is someone skimming through the images at a rate of around 1 or 2 images per second. Which if my maths serves me correctly, works out to around $18,000 per hour - which is nice work if you can get it I suppose...
Dave