This is my first entry into this particular forum and this thread. But I've been taking outdoor/nature pictures for half a century (though few good enough to post here). So take this for what you think it's worth.
Of those two "pictures" in the introductory note of this thread, the first is a photograph, the second an image. The image is lovely, suitable for selling to an individual or a magazine or a museum. But I prefer the photograph. The "ugly telephone cable" is gritty and real. That's the world that hawk lives in. Likewise the patchy trees and white sky. That's true nature, not an idealized romantic nature as might have been envisioned in the 19th century. This has nothing to do with the legitimacy of a photograph doctored into an image. To be called a nature photograph it should show all sides of nature without the "ugly" parts removed.
When I first joined FM one of the first things I saw was a sequence showing how a zoo animal's face was doctored so as to create pathos in the viewer. The face stood out in darkness, a memorable image. The missing part was the reality of that animal trapped in a cage. (Whether animals should be kept in zoos at all is not the issue, not a fight I am bringing up here.) About the same time I watched a YouTube blogger explain how he used a particular editing program to doctor a mountain landscape. As a training video it worked, sort of. The final image looked like a magazine ad for a travel agency but didn't look like what I would have seen had I been standing where the photographer had been. If the image was meant for a travel ad then so be it, ads do that all the time. If it was meant to be a picture of that mountain range and lake, then it failed because it showed me his imagined vision. Imagined visions can be anything, which makes them meaningless. I raised the question in another thread and received understandably non-committal answers about the fuzzy boundary between a photograph and an image.
Here is a "real" wildlife picture:
Jan 11, 2026 at 07:57 AM
Previous versions of jimmuller's message #16965024 « from a photograph to an image »
