PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This photograph doesn't look like a watercolor painting or a pencil sketch, but it doesn't quite look like a photograph either. The elements of the image that impressed me when I shot it are much the same as those that move the image now: the tree, the vines, the extremely tight cropping. In its original, unprocessed state I also found something surreal. Do these facts make it more of a photograph than if I had invented those qualities entirely in the computer? Is it less of a photograph now that I've used photoshop to cast a bit of unearthly light?
Wendy Costa sends along a link to this David Pogue article in the NYTimes:
Personal Tech: Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?
Pogue's list of "things that may not be photography," challenge thinking and were, for me, alone worth the read.
