I was always been trained to photograph "what's there"...basically, to bring back an accurate representation of, say, a building or a landscape. There are several techniques in conventional, silver based photography to optimize what's there....filters and exposure tricks that help to portray the scene more like the human eye perceives it rather than the way that film records it without help. If you go back in the history of photography, all films were black and white and they were orthochromatic and that meant that they recorded all skies as flat, blank space...no clouds. With the introduction of panchromatic film, the skies magically appeared looking much the same way as the human eye sees them. The application of colored filters helped enhance the tonal range of photos so they looked even more the way that the human eye saw them.

So along comes digital and all the rules are off. You can jigger things in all kinds of unreal ways. I've done this with digital myself, making really bland industrial landscapes look like frickin' backgrounds for Wagner's Ring Cycle....suddenly glowing and majestic. But I hate doing it because it's not an accurate representation of the actual scene. I jigger things in digital black and white but I do it to make it look like something that I would have done in camera and in the darkroom by choosing the film stock, development time and contrast choices...that seems fair because it's what I would have done with film...but all this color manipulation seems like you're doing an illustration and not a true photographic representation of the scene. It's one thing to replace a sky with a more typical sky that helps keep the tonal balance of a shot but I have reservations about replacing a sky with some incredible, dramatic sky that makes the whole thing look like it was shot on another planet.

Judge for yourself. Think, though, about how you would feel if you booked a vacation in some place that looked SO frickin' magnificent in the "after" photos and then got there and found that it actually looked like the "before" photos...would you be a little disappointed?