dakel wrote:
Replace a power line like in your image, nope.
That is in direct conflict with the traditions of photography. People have removed things from photographs since photography has existed. Go back and read my note about Ansel and the Lone Pine photo, a print that no one would say is “not a photograph.”
Here’s a hypothetical for you.
There’s a lovely scene, but unfortunately there is half of a rotting sandwich in it. You decide it should not be there. There are several things you could do.
1. Wait until the sandwich fully rots on its own annd disappears and only then capture the scene.
2. Step into the scene and remove it yourself.
3. Wait for someone else to walk by, notice the sandwich, and remove it to the trash unprompted.
4. Ask your assistant to remove it.
5. Ask a random stranger wandering by if they would please remove it.
6. Make the exposure and burn it down in post (à la Ansel) so that it is no longer visible.
6. Manually clone it out and replace it manually with something else in the scene.
7. Use an AI cloning tool to replace it with an approximation of what is beneath the sandwich.
At some point this all starts to be angels-on-the-head-of-pins counting, and absolute “rules” about what you can and cannot do and still call a thing a photograph start to be untenable. (Is it never OK to change anything in any photograph? Is it OK to change it but not digitally? Is there a percentage of the image that can be changed without crossing the threshold? Is it OK to change a minor element but not a major one? What is the difference? And on and on…)
While I know that a thing that emerges from a Polaroid is a photograph and that a baloney sandwich is not, the gray areas in the middle are essentially impossible to definitively categorize objectively.
But have fun trying!
(And, no, this doesn’t mean “anything goes.”)
Jan 09, 2026 at 01:43 PM
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