have you ever seen hand tinted post cards from around 1900?
they typically had a woman with a baby stroller adn a factory / smoke stacks in the background
and clouds n the sky. all 3 of those things were added to a bland image. the smoke stack to signify "progress"
the woman and stroller to show the place was alive, and the clouds because often times dry plate film recorded a blank sky.
and forget about the color, the colors they used were like an acid trip.
and there have been been plenty of newspaper photographs made with a telephoto lens that show a crowd of 5-8 people as a mob.
claiming that every digital image is a post production alteration of reality and you can't trust it IS the same as it ever was.
it is reality. people have been doing combination prints since the early days, retouching, removing things, adding things in.
when i learned how to retouch a film negative with leads, i could remove someone's braces if i had to, i could change someone's complexion,
i could print a black man or woman as a white person and visa versa, i could change the tonality of an image. i have removed telephone poles, cars
street furniture, even people from film images .... it is no different than digital ...
except that it is infront of a computer screen, and it isn't a tangible object that is being manipulated through a longer process but something in the ether.
if you ask me, NO photography can be trusted unless you can trust the intent of the person who made it.
in the end, none of this really matters to me, i do what i want just like you.
if mr butcher wants to use a nice digital camera to make his photographs he should, and if you decide you want to as well, you should.
it isn't upto me or anyone else to tell you it is wrong, and folks who thump their chest and say it is their duty to say it is wrong
well, it isn't very nice.
