A Break From Politics - Campbell Creek Impressions

These photos are of Campbell Creek yesterday late afternoon, modified a bit with photoshop.

From a bridge (near Lake Otis), modified using the posterize filter.

And the same picture using Curves.  (I still use Curves experimentally - I can't really plan the effects I'm going to get.  I probably should look for some lessons online.)

And for those of you who want to see the original.

What exactly do photographers do when they manipulate pictures in programs like Photoshop?  Is this artistry or enhancement or deception?  What you get from the camera - the third picture here - doesn't exactly portray what the original was like.  Aside from the obvious cropping out - in the sense - the rest of the picture, the camera doesn't capture  the light and colors the same way the human eye does.  And, of course, different eyes and different brains see the same scene differently.

This sort of playing around(experimenting may be too pretentious here, though not if people do this more systematically) can give us ways to see things in the scene we can't see with the naked eye.  It can also hide things we might originally see - and if someone does this to deceive, then, well it should be evaluated the way one would evaluate any deception.  How serious was the deception?  To what extent should the victim have been paying more attention?  How badly was the victim(s) hurt?  Those sorts of questions.

Here's another picture of Campbell Creek further down the bike path.  This one is looking south. (The first ones were looking west).

I used the posterize filter to get this one too.

I think many, if not most photographers do some fiddling with their pictures now just to get a nicer looking picture - playing with the saturation, contrast, exposure buttons are the most obvious ways.  Cropping is basic.  But even the earliest black and white photographers played with their images in the dark room to achieve similar improvements to what they had caught on the negative.

All the images are looking down from bridges, into the sun's reflection on the water.