The Debate of the Century

The hot topic among all photographers seems to be where the line is drawn in the sand to distinguish the difference from photography and digital art. At what point is digital enhancement too much?

As I was recently going over the requirements for prints in the camera club's yearly competition, the question was raised as to what the categories are. My reply... "Color and Black & White", While there were no real complaints about the size and matting requirements, the aspect of digital enhancement was the catalyst for the debate to begin.

One of the simplest defining feature should be wether or not you could create the same effect in the conventional darkroom. Increasing saturation, dodging, burning and even some image composition are few enhancements that can be achieved in the darkroom. That brings to mind an image I saw once where some dogs were placed in the clouds of a sky scene using Photoshop. While it is very much easier to blend the two separate images using Photoshop, there are ways in which it could be accomplished with traditional darkroom methods.

I recall many years ago when I was a youth working out in my darkroom, I took an image of my mother and exposed it on top of an image of our pet cat. Then exposed an image of a dog beside that and superimposed my mom's boyfriends head on top of that. The whole process was a diligent project of masking out the animal heads and burning the human heads in their place. If I had spent even more time on this project I could have really smoothed out the area where the two images meet, but in any case it was still a very tricky composition to produce without the aide of a computer.

The progression of image enhancements applied to the image shown in the pop up window slowly go to what could be extreme. As you look at these images, is there a point at which you no longer would consider this medium as photography?