Tom Yi said:
Like I said, it's all shades of gray, since we are shooting digitally, it's all digital graphics to some point.
My personal decision is to mainly stick with curves, contrast, crop, level, dodge, burn, and adjusting colors.
If I take images from another photograph and place it onto a different photograph, I consider that more digital graphics rather than photography. If they did the same in film, I'd consider it more graphics design, rather than photography. I think personally for me, if you introduce things not in the original shot by taking it from another photo, that is a line for me where digital photography becomes digital graphics.
Both are art forms to me, but different forms. I don't think one is better or worse, just different.
I realize that for landscape with very dynamic scenes, only an ND filter or HDR/Layers will do to properly expose the shot. Like I said, it's just a personal distinction. Nothing more, nothing less.
Tom,
You covered a lot! Let me break it up into two parts, 1. you don't do tonal mapping and 2. composites are not photography, (a new but interesting topic you have introduced).
1. Tonal mapping: This you ARE routinely doing anyway, since you use a lot of PS tools! Your permitted tools are really no different, except in degree and finesse, from those used by experienced, especially B&W photographers doing purposeful "tone mapping".
2. Photography doesn't include composites: One can't hijack a common name like "Photography" with history and usage and narrowly redefine it without consensus. One can, of course, create one's own new term.
In your "subclass" of Photography that you prefer, would include only:
photographs made with one shot and one lens at one time, not altered except using, "curves, contrast, crop, level, dodge, burn, and adjusting colors" as available in PS 2 2006.
To exclude from "Photography", images accepted as great photographs made with from several sources, you might be a excommunicating works of masters.
It is an error to consider digital photography real and true, because it isn't.
It is merely a way we want to SHOW things.
It is all artifact. That's what photography is.
There is as much point, IMHO, in saying humans with artificial hips or pacemakers are less human as saying a landscape picture, with an apple added, is no longer a landscape photograph!
Asher