On post-processing and taking photographs of artworks

Ducks, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Andreas commented my photos from Kotka, especially the "creepy house". His comments were spot on the thinking I had when posting that photo.

I was pondering about changing the sky, which was really too bright and blue to support the "creepiness" of the image. Darkening the sky would have been possible (but I'm not sure how well I could have pulled that off), as also adding dramatic clouds etc. to the photo. (How unfortunate that the clouds appeared only later that day.) But after thinking about this a bit, I didn't do any such things to the photo.

I'm perfectly willing to manipulate photos to look like my impression of them, but I'm very hesitant to change them beyound recognition. For example, in the photo here I used LightZone to brighten the dark areas a bit, so that the colors appeared better, but that was all.

Another such problematic area is the use of other artworks as a material for a photo. Last September I made some postings about this, but didn't really finish my thinking. A few more months of photography later I'm much more willing to make photos of such things, because it is now much more apparent to me how much possibilities there are in capturing things in a two-dimensional frame. It is a separate art form. However, there needs to be significant added value in the photo for it to be valuable, and this is of course a somewhat gray area.

George Barr made a posting on this: "... whether one can take any artistic credit for photographing something someone else made as a piece of art - whether sculpture as in this case, or architecture, graffiti or even an ornamental garden." The issue is complex, but it is nice to see such clearly written thoughts on the matter.

Of course, for subjects like the one here, there are no such problems. Or are there? Should I give credit to the city residents who feed the birds?