One of the most interesting discussions I get into with other people who do photography is what counts as "photography". Just about everybody who does photography has a line where they believe photo editing turns into "photomanipulation" rather than photography, but this line is in completely different places depending on who you ask. Some people believe that if you do anything besides alter contrast and saturation you have a photomanipulation rather than a photograph, but many others will happily alter a photograph beyond recognition and still call it a photo.
Here is what I think.
Photography is about capturing what we perceive or experience in the world rather than what we actually see. When we experience the world around us we tend to remember colors and shapes as being clear and vibrant, but when we take a picture of that same scene we often end up with muted colors or fuzzy shapes. This is why so many people decide that altering contrast and saturation are basic features of photography - it's how we adjust the photo to mirror how we remember the scene. When we look at a flower we don't remember the dull red in our picture, we remember it as a brilliant red. Similarly, nobody is interested in a picture that flatly displays a scene as it was; rather, they want a photo that looks like what they remember or shows how they experienced something.
For example, we don't see the world in black and white but well-done black and white photos can often call attention to features of a scene that are beautiful in their own way and which are not obvious in color photos - shadows, lighting, so on. Does that make black and white photos "not real photos"? I would tend to think not, and I think most people would agree. Black and white is a way of altering what we focus on in the scene being shot, but not what we are actually seeing. It is simply changing our
perception of what we are seeing.
This is also why a fisheye image can be used to show massive scale and we still call it a "photograph" even though it is clearly distorted - that image, while not showing reality accurately, still tells us something true about the photographer's experience of the world (in this case, the feeling they got when they looked at something huge).
Another good example is HDR photography. This is a clear example of a photo not reflecting reality and is literally a photomanipulation in every case - you have to merge multiple exposures to create one, so it cannot be done with a single shot. However, I and many others still consider the resulting HDR image a photograph, and the art of making one is still photography. Why? Because quite simply, the HDR image is still showing us something true about how the photographer viewed a scene even if it isn't showing the reality of what they saw. Or if you prefer, it is showing multiple realities simultaneously.
In the same way, I think that editing images heavily so that they reflect how we experienced a scene is completely fine and well within the scope of "photography" even if the editing means the photo is no longer "accurate". For example, the below photo is an original frame off of my camera with minimal editing.
Frankly, it's awful. I took it because I thought the yellow flowers looked good standing out against a dark bed of greenery in a shadow, but in the picture above the flowers are boring and the green is much brighter than I remembered. Pretty much a total loss - this doesn't look like what I remember seeing, and anyone would agree it is not a great photo.
But!
With some post-processing magic, I was able to bring this image back around to what I remembered. I posted it a few days ago and am placing it below again for comparison.
The yellows are bright! The shadows are dark! The leaves are the same weird blue I remembered from the shadow!
That's the difference between what I saw and what I perceived. What I saw was a boring green flowerbed with some boring yellow flowers, but what I remembered and was trying to capture was a vibrant scene of yellow flowers standing out from dark shadows in a forest. The edited image is true to my experience and (I think) evokes the same feeling that I had when I took the picture, but it is clearly not accurate to reality. I don't think that makes it any less of a photograph, though some people would claim this is no longer a true photograph since I completely changed the colors from the original.
I think that in the end, that's the heart of the matter for me - photography is about causing the viewer to perceive a scene in the same way that the photographer experienced it, even if that experience isn't accurate to reality.
