>>3455939Okay, I’m at work now so I can screw over my employer and respond do you.
The idea of a “pure” straight out of camera photo is a myth. In the days of film, your choice of film stock would heavily affect the final photo, and so would your choice of developer in some cases. A “straight from the camera no filter” film image would be an unprocessed strip of gray or brown film and no visible picture.
It’s the same way with digital. JPEGs straight out of camera have a lot of processing applied to them, and even raw images need to have processing applied so you can actually see a picture, and demosaicing and sharpening algorithms can produce visibly different photos from the same raw file.
And even if you *could* actually use an unprocessed photo straight out of the camera, you wouldn’t—or shouldn't—want to. Deciding how you want the final image to look is just as much a part of making a photo as the actual taking of it. Choosing how you want your tone curves, adjusting your histogram, changing the colors, dodging and burning, these are all just as important as and no less valid than the decisions you make in-camera at the moment.
Obviously there is a line where an image stops being a photograph and starts being digital artwork that uses a photo as one of its base ingredients, but that line is wide and fuzzy. Insisting that only “unedited” photos count as photography just makes you sound like either an idiot who doesn’t understand the fundamental nature of photography or an idiot who can’t figure out how to edit and is trying to cover up his own inadequacies.
