Photograph Manipulation and Digital Art

Some people denigrate the art coming from digital photographs and being generated from a computer. For decades some refused to consider photographs as art. That is no longer the case.

Let's take the photo art of the famous Ansel Adams that we have all seen. Mr. Adams would spend hours or even days manipulating his original photograph into the final art we know today. He used the tools he had available at the time, his camera and his darkroom. He had to talent to see art through his camera as well as the talent to take his original image and manipulate it into something special in his darkroom.

Andy Warhol was a very talented graphic artist. That isn't what he became famous for. Andy Warhol is famous for Polaroid pictures. Photographs that he manipulated through the use of silk screening to produce his final works.

Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol became famous because they manipulated photographs using the tools they had at the time. The truth be told many artists work from photographs or even project photographs onto a canvas and copy them using paints or pencils. Don't think for a nano second that if Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol had the computer technology they wouldn't have used it.

In fact odds are that unless you have the money to buy an original painting the print you buy is digital art. The original was scanned by a computer, turned into a digital image and the prints were produced by a computer. Unless it is an original that painting you have hanging on the wall is a digital image.

If you don't care for the art that's fine. Don't discount it's value because it is digitally manipulated digital photographs.

As a commercial photographer I get paid to manipulate the photographs you see in ads.