The simple act of taking a photograph is manipulating reality. I had someone recently describe to me how the eye actually sees--when you stand at a scenic viewpoint, taking in a vast landscape, not only is your eye adjusting constantly to brightness and darkness; not only are you seeing it as a three-dimensional image (assuming you have two working eyes); but notice that your eyes are constantly moving. Your eyes are darting around, picking up pieces of information. The human brain is where all these pieces of information get transformed into a composite, living image. How can you be expected to capture all that with a two-dimensional image?
Also, look at a typical photo magazine, their "let's compare the best films of 2004" snooze-o-rama article. No two films captures reality the same way. But which one captures it best? That depends--are you color blind or do you have normal vision? What minor damage have your eyes sustained over the years, leading to minor variances in color perception? And what about the idiosyncrasies of your brain? i.e., if red is your favorite color, you're going to key in on that and notice how "accurate" the red representation is, but you might miss that fact that the blues are tweaked.
I could go on, but hopefully by now you see my point. A photograph of a scene is a total abstraction, even if you use an 8 by 10 view camera with a wide angle lens and the "best" film available . So accept the abstraction, and go with it. Galen Rowell and Ansel Adams were often not working with average scenery, and using thier brilliances to average into spectacular. They were typically working with a scene that looked spectacular to the eye, but would be rendered less much less spectacular by abstracting it into a photograph. So they used skills, tricks, techniques, filters, processes--whatever you want to call them--to make the photograph cause as much (or more) emotional response as the original scene they happened upon. The emotions caused by the photograph might be slightly different, because the original scene and the resultant photograph are in fact different, but to achieve close to the same level of "ooo!" and "ahhh!" is, I think, the goal.
There's this classic Ansel Adams image of the Eastern Sierra foothills taken from Owens Valley. While up in Carmel taking a photography workshop I was walking through the Weston Gallery with photographer Don Eddy. There's a famous Ansel Adams image hanging on the wall, a huge signed print of an image I've seen many times in books, and he says "look closely..." He explains that this is taken from Lone Pine. How can you tell? If you look closely, you can just barely make out the "LP" carved on the mountain. He said that when Ansel first starting printing from that negative, the "LP" was very dominant--just like it is in the real world, when you're driving up Highway 395 and look to the west. Pretty quickly Ansel decided that the manmade "LP" detracted from the natural beauty of the scene. It was real, but it wasn't what people wanted to see. So he started burning the "LP" into near oblivion. Suddenly, without the "LP" being visible, the image became more natural, more "real" to people, and he sold more copies. But it was in fact *less* real. I'd love to see an early print of that image...
I think the goal of capturing an image is to capture an emotion. Since the image itself is an abstraction of the emotion, in an attempt to remain true to the emotion of the original scene, you may have to play some tricks. Being true to the emotion does not necessarily mean staying true to the subject itself. If the "tricks" used remain true to the goal, they are acceptable. If the tricks add nothing, detract from the original intent, or send the emotions down a different path, then it's all over--you've bastardized the emotion.
[ photograph above: Dante's View, Death Valley National Park, 2003 ]
