To add one thing, there is one photographer whose work I respect and enjoy a great whose marketing materials tend to suggest this “I don’t manipulate” stuff. (Don’t worry, I’m positive that it is not a photographer who is a current friend of anyone reading this and I’m also positive that the photographer is not reading this – and I really do like this person’s photography a lot.) This person clearly made (wonderful and effective!) use of certain obvious filtering techniques to render (very beautiful and effective!) versions of scenes that are significantly altered by this, and this photographer’s film choices also had (a wonderful, in most cases) effect on the images that is essentially the same as that produced by manipulating color balance, saturation, and curves today in Photoshop.

One of things I wonder about when I read the “purist” and “I don’t manipulate” claims is why photographers who use these (perfectly normal and almost universally used) techniques feel the need to claim that they don’t? What is it about claiming that all you did was point the camera at the scene and record what was there – when we all know that there is much, much more to the process than that – that compels photographers to shy away from this truth?

Dan

(BTW: If any of my photographer friends are reading this and wondering, “Hey, is Dan writing about me?”… No, I’m not. ;-)