after reading the different opinions about this topic, I think that there is a problem with the use or definition of words....photo, picture, image, manipulation, reality, see, envisage, etc.....for me a photo is just and image of what was in front of my lens during the instant I pressed the shutter....a picture could be a photo or a composition of several photos.....what is reality?....for me reality is what was there in front of my eyes...and I can express that in different ways....in black and white if I like textures, lines, light and shadows, colour if I like to see the colours of the nature.....manipulation is to put red where there was not red, or green where there was no green at all, clouds where there were no clouds, absence of a person where it was a person, etc. ....luminance and saturation of the different colours, at least for me, are dependent on the observer, so that they can be adjusted during the development process...in fact, in the days or film, the characteristics of the colours in a photo depended on the film (Fuji, Kodak and Agfa gave different tonalities, so..where was the "real" colour of the landscape?)....this also means that a photo can be taken as IR or even UV....my eyes cannot see them, but they are there!...so that...an IR or UV photography...is not real?.....HDR....is not real?.....yes, it is because I am not modifying the subject, I am taking several photos (almost instantly) to improve the exposure and the view of the subject, but I am not manipulating the subject.....I am helping the sensor to see what my eyes can see at once.......the UV and IR contributions of light in the landscape are there, I am not creating light......the same analysis could be done with respecto to filters and composition of photos to obtain a panorama.....
Now....what is a picture?...it can be a photo....or the sum of manipulated photos....in the past I used to follow a well-known bird photographer until the appearance of digital photography. I discovered that some very nice or amazing photos were not photos but "pictures". When the eye of the bird was out of focus, he used to take the eye of the same bird from another photo and replaced it, when the wing was out of the frame, he used to copy and paste the lacking part of the wing...so for me that was not a photo, it was a "picture".....for me the real value of a photo is "to be there" and have the expertise to obtain a view of a certain subject at a certain instant.....I am not saying that what Alain Briot or some other photographers do is not fine art....I like very much the images that I see in Briot's web site and his art of composing them....he is a real artist, but for me (most people can disagree), they are not photos.....if the clouds were not there at the moment he took the photo, I am not seeing how the subject was, but what Alain would have wanted to see there after thinking and experimenting with the images...that's perfectly OK and I accept that....so he is not ruining landscape photography, he is creating (great) landscape pictures.....this is my personal view of what I consider a photo and what not, but this is just an opinion......
Agustin