This is an email that I received from a former art teacher who is a member of a photo club that I attend.

Hi Tom,

          On occasion I look at and read the online site Digital Photography School.  As you well know , more times than not the info goes right over my head.  But I did trip on this in this week’s email and thought you would EITHER enjoy reading it , OR it would set you in a tailspin.  It sounds like February’s Shooters’ meeting.

Thinking of you,

                             Cynthia

http://digital-photography-school.com/opinion-why-photoshop-is-ruining-landscape-photography

Do check it out.

My response:

Cynthia,

Thank you for sharing this article. I had read it a while ago. No tailspin, though.

Competitions now are savvy enough to stipulate when they do not accept manipulated images. Most "open competitions" accept them. 

There is nothing wrong with purists and journalists who restrict themselves to only tonal adjustments. I often do that myself. However, if you are creating a photograph as pure art, by definition no restrictions should apply. Otherwise art becomes stagnant and creativity becomes suppressed. Whether or not an image is manipulated (as all images are to some degree) or not, quality and impact is determined by the skills of the artist. As you well know there are many images that we come across that are extremely trite, boring, poorly composed, yet technically accurate reproductions of what the photographer witnessed. Personally, I go to my happy place when I see those, politely bite my tongue, and hope that I don't blurt out something offensive to that person who probably is very pleased with what they have captured. 

Keep creating art! It doesn't have to be beautiful, accurate, or anything other than whatever you want it to be.

Thank you for letting me rant about this again.

Tom

Here is my most recent and by far the most challenging photo restoration that I have ever performed. It might be hard to tell from these low resolution images, but this image has an infestation of mildew over the entire image. Fixing the tears and lost detail is simple compared to getting the clapboards to look acceptable in spite of all the mildew damage.
The young girl didn't have enough detail left in her face to merit restorable facsimile. The infant  had at least one eye, half his nose, and enough hair that I could fake a reasonable approximation of what he might have resembled. This was done in Photoshop CS5 by doing a reverse cloning of the eye and partial nose. The mouth was cloned from his older brother, transformed, skewed, then rotated. The tall young man in the middle rear is L. P. Lavoie, my Grandfather! For a restoration quote email me at tomlavoiephot@hotmail.com.

I'm now offering photo restoration. This image is one of my father's mother and some of his siblings. It was quite a challenge to bring the image this far since it was a low resolution image taken off the web. It's hard to see how deteriorated this image was. For a client I would set up a file sharing program that would grant me access to a large resolution image that I could access quickly and easily.

Here are some selected shots from my return trip from The River Valley Artisan Tour in Westmoreland, NH. 

This is from an event that I did for the Library in Westmoreland, NH. The hat was created by a local artist. The shot was taken outdoors in an Easy Up tent that functioned as a light diffuser. This created an evenly distributed soft light with subtle contrast. In order to get around some quirky shadows, I slightly brightened her face using a Nikon SB900 flash channeled through a Rogue snoot. A snoot is a type of device that directs light to a confined area. It can easily be homemade or expensive ones can be purchased. The Rogue snoot works exceptionally well on this type of speedlight, comes with an assortment of grids and gels, and is reasonably priced.
It should be a simple task to correct the distortion in the frame using Lightroom 4.

This is my favorite shot from the Great Waters Music Festival Masters of Motown concert. I already had several shots of the staff and the audience which was my assignment, so I took the liberty of doing some more creative photography. My Nikon D700 is probably capable of revealing the audience behind the soloist without the excessive noise that accompanies the requisite high ISO. However, I felt that the image was much more compelling with the audience's shadows and her features highlighted. The most important detail and most challenging thing was to make sure her eyes were in focus in spite of the low light. This was shot at f/4 ISO 5000 280mm (using a 1.4 teleconverter) in aperture priority mode using manual focus and a lot of guessing.

My sincerest gratitude goes to the other members of the Four Guys Photo Club and to to my twin sister, Judy Hurd for  the assistance they so generously contributed to help set up and strike my display at The Artists in the Park exhibit in Wolfeboro.  Also, your debriefing at the pub afterwards is invaluable.