Photography versus Artistry?

I like to take photographs. Not the “grandma’s 95^th birthday” type or the “whole gang at Uno’s” type. Not even the “Oh! Your grandson is soooo cute” type. I tend to lean heavily toward the historic/landscape/interesting angle type of photo. On more than one occasion, Mrsfabp has commented in a “where are the people in the photograph” sort of way.

The kind of photographs I try to get are more of the “unusual kinds of architecture”, or themes. Since coming to Las Cruces, I have started a “Portals” collection which is windows, doors and arches, a “Holiday” group which is local doors after a snow storm last month, and most recently, the Mesilla Balloon Rally, which really is about colorandcontrasts.

Just last week I was talking to a friend, Clair Z, also a photographer, about manipulating the images after taking them. She had a wonderful photo of the pecan orchard next to her adobe home that had some telephone wires in it. Someone she knew, used a photograph manipulation tool, Photoshop, to fix it and now this beautiful image has no distracting telephone wires any longer. Our discussion centered on whether what was done to this photograph constituted photography any longer or was it art, because the image was changed from the original one.

Just a few of my thoughts on this. Ansel Adams, perhaps America’s Greatest Photographer, once said that her would print negatives perhaps 75 times to get the shadows and contrast just right. He did not have the benefit of a computer, but is this so different than removing telephone lines from a photo – creating better shadows wherethere are none? There have been lots of articles about fashion photographers who usePhotoshop to make people better looking or thinner, or muscular, or, well you get the idea. Again, is this different than the telephone lines or shadows?

I thought I would show you a couple of examples of things I have done to photos, to show exactly what I mean. In this first photo from the balloon rally, this is the original picture:

I like it a lot but see several issues. First the color is flat. It was very early morning and the light was very golden and warm but that ends up muddying the picture. I used Photoshop to edit it by making it a bit less warm, intensifying the blues for the sky and sharpening it up a bit, top get this:

A bit corrected, and a much better photograph. It took about 45 seconds on iPhoto to do this.

Here is a second photograph that needs a bit more work:

Besides the color issues, there is a very distracting line of buildings in the bottom of the photo. So besides correcting color, I would, straighten it a hair, crop this one a bit and end up with this:

Again, a much better rendition.

Finally one more.

This photo is good but needs some work. Besides fixing color, the half paraglider bothers me as does the branch blurred at the very bottom. So I will do a little retouching to remove branches, crop out the half man, and see what I come up with:

I think this is much better.

So, is it photography or artistry? As a photographer, I lean toward the photographer end of the spectrum. I have no problem saying I do photography. I just cannot bring myself to say, I do art.