Good Photography or Good Photoshopping?

A debate that never dies, when does a photograph stop being a photograph and cross the borders into digital art?

It seems in recent years with the advent of digital photography, photography itself has changed face somewhat. Where photographers used to rely on getting shots right "in camera" they now have a whole host of software applications at their disposal to take photos out of a digital camera and "make" them perfect ... sometimes too perfect.

There used to be an art in producing an image using available light, filters and good photography skills but now every Tom, Dick and Harry can become a Photoshop specialist and produce photographs that will leave you drooling. But these images are actually too good to be true and in most cases NOT what the human eye saw, or even close to it when it comes to certain photographers.

First off there's the mediocre photographer who is not interested in becoming a better "photographer" but instead relies on photoshop skills to rescue images that were not very good to begin with and turn them into images that are a shadow of their former selves ... this quite simply is not photography and never will be.

Then there's the photographer who has a good eye for composition and can produce single frame images that are correctly exposed "in camera" but instead have become too reliant on image blending techniques and photoshop skills to produce images that look great but do not faithfully represent the truth. These photographers claim that they use such techniques because the camera cannot see things properly so they need these image blends to produce an image which is more accurate to what they saw. I've stood side by side with such photographers and their final image looks great BUT it's most certainly NOT truthful to what nature presented. Sadly these types pass themselves off as Master Photographers but are far from it.

Then there's the photographer who relies exclusively on producing images in camera, using filters and solid photography skills who merely use photoshop to adjust levels, sharpening, white balance and minor image tweaks but entirely on a single frame image. Very much the way it's always been done. This type of photographer uses photoshop as a photo-lab, much the way it was done all these years and believe it or not these types are not a dying breed, they are very much still the majority in photography circles.

In 20 years time I wonder how many "photographs" will actually be "photographs"