The follow up...

This is the follow up after the response to my earlier comment...

:-) with all due respect, if one thinks that adjusting levels and rotating/cropping is not part of photography, then they don't know much about photography to start with. As I tried to explain in my earlier post, in film era photography, all these cropping/rotating/adjusting levels at the print processing stage was considered the bread and butter of pro, semi-pro, and enthusiast photographers. But I can understand someone who has no clue about how the chemical era photography worked, coming to the conclusion that adjusting levels/rotating/cropping is 'not photography' :-)

I don't even consider these as 'post production' but as an integral part of the photography production. If you want to draw parallels with the chemical/film photography, then it would be as follows:

If you want to be in the same level as a person using a point and shoot 35mm camera who gets his prints through some colour lab (btw I won't call this level as photography) then calling whatever that comes out of your digital camera as the final photograph is justifiable.

But if you want to be compared to a chemical film 'photographer' who does his/her own developing in a darkroom or developing kit and process his/her own prints, then in the digital era, doing level adjustments, crop/rotating just comes naturally.

For me 'post production' is something done beyond level tweaking crop/rotating (while these are considered part of the 'production' not 'post production') . For example, an artwork on a magazine cover would be 'post produced'.

And I am sorry to say, the 75% you mentioned, either doesn't know how to do it or are too lazy :-)

Sorry if I am sounding harsh... but I am having a bad day...

'Purist' photography

I thought of publishing the following rant I made on Chicanelk's photo on flickr...

With all due respect, the whole 'purist' talk in digital photography is a (imho) fool's premise. Discussing about that the camera actually 'sees' when taking the shot would lead us in to a completely different direction ... so lets not try to go in to CMOS/CCD sensors and different manufacturer's specs.. :-) In short, once the photo is imprinted on the sensor, to call it 'reality' would be a fallacy to start with.

I also disagree with the parallels drawn between raw unprocessed digital photos and the 'good old days' of chemical processing. I think I am qualified to comment on this because I have done it my self. ie I have developed my own negatives in a dark room and also done the photo processing myself as well. Well true, if you are not serious about photography you just naively give the film roll to the studio/processing house and the next day you come and collect the prints and be blissfully ignorant about what happened to your film roll canister while you were away. Actual 'photographers' do things a bit differently :-) With chemical film, you don't have too many options when developing the film roll (there are a number of different 'standard' processes defined by the likes of Kodak, Fuji etc) . You have already preselected the ISO of the film roll so cannot tweak anything there. This is quite similar to the RAW image or JPEG that comes out of your digital camera. But actually making prints out of the negative is a very creative process. The old school way of processing colour prints is to have an enlarger and exposing your photo paper under the three different primary colours and giving a chemical bath to process each of the primary colours separately, then you finally seal of the print with finisher. The amount of time you expose each colour, the intensity of the lamp etc are all in the total control of the person processing the prints. This is exactly equivalent to manipulating the curves or levels in photoshop for digital prints. Apart from this, there are many other dodge/burn masking effects you could do and is and was done with chemical processing. Photoshop provides many of these 'chemical print processing' effect plus a few more options.

I hope I have explained enough why I consider the 'if you touch your digital print with photoshop, thats not reality' argument a bit silly :-)

Photography is an art (even documentary photography, mind you!) and it's totally at the discretion of the photographer how he/she wants to represent a scene/subject/event, this is true regardless of whether you shoot digital or film. In the pre-digital era, everyone didn't have the financing and/or technical know how to process/print your own photos chemically. In that sense nearly all of us did depend on the guy at the processing lab and his big processing machine (Even the processing machines needs a parameter set to control the exposure settings) to come up with a good result. But nowadays with digital photography and so many tools (Photoshop/Lightroom - even Picasa for that matter) all of us have the chance to play 'professional photographer processing your own prints' :-) It's a pity that most of us don't realize that and live in a 'purist ' cave...:-)