Sophisticated Staircase

[Manfred M]

Dan, I am firmly against any such efforts. Ergo, none.

I am also against removing blemishes, cracks, etc from stuff like pottery and rust from iron/steel work.

The Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi applies:

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/2018...view-the-world

By a similar token, I remain against removing human artifacts from a scene, e.g. bob wahr.

If one lives in a country, like Japan, that is consistently hit by earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons, the national psyche is impacted. Impermanence is real and tangible. The Shinto Grand Shrine in Ise is disassembled and rebuilt every 20 years. Impermanence is a key feature of the Japanese dry gardens, although even there gravel, rather than sand is raked to represent rippling water. Sand is just a bit too impermanent.

This is a wonderful counter-point to the trains that run to within a few seconds of their scheduled time, fresh produce in shops that is packaged in a way to protect it from even the slightest damage, factories designed to turn out 100% identical (and error free) products..

True nature photographers attempt to capture a scene that has no signs of the "hand of man". This isn't just having people in the shot, but non-native species, signs of human planting (trees in a reforested area, for example), etc. Cloning and removing anything through any means other than cropping is definitely not acceptable.

I tend to be a little less extreme in my own approach, but as I mention in #19, if there is a distracting element in the image, it generally has to go. Cloning is easy, but often simple dodging and burning are a more elegant approach. When I shoot a scene, I have absolutely no issue of moving a piece of furniture or picking up some garbage to ensure that I have a cleaner starting point.

[pschlute]

At the risk of taking the thread even more off topic and away from the beautiful staircase, I take the following view on editing an image, and photography in general:

I use my camera and processing skills to create an artistic image, not a record of what my camera was pointed at.

If I remove blemishes or objects, or adjust the exposure/colour I do it to create that "artistic" image.

You may or may not like the image I produce, but that is a subjective decision on your part.