Any photo you see has some manipulation. Already converting a scene into RGB is "manipulation"
It is NEVER what the photographer saw.
And it is not dishonest per se. The photographer takes what he can with the means at his disposition and converts the result into "what he saw and felt". Or what he feels at the moment he translates his file into an image. Or just what he wants.
He doesn't make a register of reality but a translation of it, filtering it with his mind, his feelings or whatever.
Photography is not an "art", it is a medium.
Like painting, music, poetry, cooking.
How good one is at it depends above all upon whether you are satisfied with what you do and, in a lesser measure, what people whose opinion you appreciate think about it.
Just MHO
I completely disagree. Translating to RGB isn't a manipulation, it's a capture, or a recording. A person ten years from now can look at a camera capture and say, "This is what it looked like, given the limitations of the recording device." It has, at the capture stage, no human involvement other than what it took to create a sensor, etc. Then, a photographer may work over the photo. As I noted in my original post, if this is done to push the photo closer to the visual reality, I would perhaps call it "enhanced." If you make photos on a tripod and combine images, that is what you're doing -- as long as you don't remove or replace or alter objects in the image. The same is true when you stack images to increase depth of field.
Of course manipulation is not dishonest per se -- as long as the creator doesn't represent it as a pure capture. And they usually don't. I use slot canyons as an example, but you can see unmentioned manipulations everywhere in the "photo art" world, and especially in landscapes. I think I have yet to see a slot canyon picture that actually looks like a slot canyon -- the color is always pushed, and the pushing is never mentioned.
Once you get into the realm of what the photographer "feels," you are departing the realm of photography and going to something different...but in most cases, the photographer presents the image as something external, rather than internal. "This is what it looked like," rather than"this is what I felt." If you present a landscape photo as the latter, I doubt many people would purchase it, because they want to know what the landscape looked like, not what some photographer, who they don't know, felt. (There are exceptions in the art world, of course: Moonrise and Running White Deer are classic examples in which manipulations produced an artistic image -- but neither hid the manipulations.)
Exactly, Rab. Every photo you see IS a manipulation. Neither film nor digital records the real world. Both record an image that's been processed according to the peculiarities of the film or in the case of digital according to the decisions made by the manufacturer of the camera and the sensor.
I think this is the same sophomoric argument that many, well, sophomores make while passing the joint -- everything is relative, everything is subjective. If film or a sensor isn't recording the real world, what is it recording? It is, of course, a recording, it's not the actual world, but it is a recording of *something,* and the recording is real, and if a group of people look at a recording of a face, they can all agree that it's a recording of a face. The fact that they see it was a recording not only of a face, but a particular face, separate from all the other ten billion faces on earth, and immediately recognizable as such, should suggest that the decisions made by the manufacturer are of no particular importance. If the manufacturer produced a machine that *didn't* do faithful recordings, few people would buy it. (And there are cameras that do that, and they are bought by few people.)
I almost entirely agree with Martin, but not quite entirely. There are pro-product images that hover very closely to the definition of fine art. Just because a photographer has a client does not necessarily mean that everything he produces must be a basic, pragmatic image designed to sell something. It could also be an artistic image (meant to sell something.) Richard Avedon was a person who often did this.
