[stoppingdown]

Pardon me if I don't read the slrlounge discussion - I've just skimmed it. I'm interested whether the discussion goes on here, a few ones but good ones 

 

I don't understand the referral to "modern photography". Post-processing always occurred, as the blogger wrote, and was always part of the thing. There are various things to be considered:

 

1. which kind of post-processing we're talking about. Some are merely technical ones, I mean they expand the envelope of capabilities of the camera: e.g. panorama, hdr, focus stacking. Some are entirely new, some were always there, but hard to do, at the limit of the unfeasibility. Here we can use the word "modern".

 

2. which kind of photographer you are. The blogger defines himself "digital artist" rather than "photographer", and it makes sense: the advertising photo he attached to the post is a special kind of photo, which not necessarily must be realistic. Many photography styles don't need to be realistic, rather they communicate a vision of the artist, so no problem. If you're a photojournalist, well, I see a problem. It's fine if you post-process to give the photo some visual quality that wasn't there, but you can't remove or add stuff. Also in many naturalistic photo contexts there are strict rules to respect, because the scene must be "real".

 

3. Realism must also be put in context. From a certain point of view, one might assert that anything not shot at Æ’/infinite is not "real": the human eye and brain don't see things with lots of bokeh.

 

3. Even when you stick to realism, let me think of landscape, there are perceptual things to be considered that might imply to change something - e.g. saturate some colours more than they would be reproduced by a wavelength scanner, just because the lighting context of the real scene is different from the context in which the photo will be watched.

 

Thus, post-processing is _always_ fundamental. It just must be used with coherence (and ethics where they matter).