Moving on from NCV's thread "Is this a photograph", we can also ask ourselves: What is photography?
Is it the end result of taking a picture with a camera (of any sort) and not manipulating beyond what can be done in a classic darkroom (so, crop, dodge & burn etc. are OK, removing the sky and replacing it with another are not.
Or is it anything goes as long as the end result looks good (and who defines what looks good?).
Or something in between?
Go on - let's hear your thoughts?
Alan
In DPR, this sort of post would immediately get locked or deleted and you might have got sin-binned because it was guaranteed to create a massive flame war.
But this is not DPR, so let's see 😉
Any 'flame wars' will get moved out. It's a genuine question and I'm interested in peoples opinions.
Alan
Well, for about 200 years photography was basically an entirely (photo-)chemical process, optionally helped by lenses.
Digital CCD and CMOS sensors changed that drastically, so I'd say today's "digital photography" is really something else than what we now call "analog photography", just the end products may turn out similar.
Even advanced techniques like multiple exposures, focus stacking, HDR, etc. were used back then with film. What once required significant skill and effort is now made much easier, thanks to computational photography and digital post processing.
Currently AI helps us to get to the next major increment in the evolution of photography. I perceive generative AI tools like Copilot and Midjourney as the culmination of collage techniques in photography.
In the most basic form, I point a camera at a subject and the camera takes a photograph. Fox Talbot called it the "Pencil of Nature". I guess he ment drawing with light, which is a pretty good definition.
At this point I have a latent image that needs processing in or out of camera. The camera can be a cell phone, right up to a huge space telescope. The next step is the photograph where it is processed to become a print and the question becomes, what is a photograph?
Text generated AI images are illustration, not photography, as the were not generated by a sensitive surface recording an image projected by a lens.
Photographic images can completely be made without any camera and without any lens, e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogram
Generative AI is trained from actual photos, zillions of them, and keeps their essence by transforming it into lots of parameters for the neural nets these tools are based on.
Although their user interface may be entirely text based, what you get as an end result is the regurgitated essence of the photos they've been trained with, rearranged at pixel level in most intricate collage patterns.
For me, a photograph is an image taken with a camera. And after a certain level of manipulation, a photograph becomes a digital image. I'm not very clear about what the limit is and, honestly, it's not something that worries me much either...