From the DPReview.com site:

“We’re proud and excited to announce that Dpreview has been acquired by the worlds leading online retailer, Amazon.com. Started as hobby site in 1998, dpreview.com has grown to be the number one destination for anyone interested in digital cameras and digital photography. Each month dpreview.com has seven million unique visitors (over 22 million sessions) who read over 120 million pages. “We’ve worked very hard over the last eight years to deliver consistently high quality content to our readers”, founder Phil Askey said. “It will be fantastic to be able to expand and build on that without compromising our quality or independence. With the support and resources of Amazon we can achieve this.”

Phil: Today marks an exciting milestone in the history of dpreview.com, everyone here is very much looking forward to being able to do more with Amazon’s help. We’re aiming to expand our product coverage and deliver new site features for our readers and our daily community.”

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For more information and the press release visit DPReview.com.

But does the border still even exist? When you push your “saturation” bar a bit too much, or mix channels (or any other digital effect) in a way that turns the photo more unnatural, are you still in the realms of photography or are you entering the digital art world? To some extent, and from what I’ve been hearing, if a photo is too much modified, then loses some of its creative value. I don’t agree. Photography as art is done to elicit emotions. If the artist’s objective is better achieved with digital modifications, then let it be so. On the other hand, if you are trying to capture reality as it is, maybe you shouldn’t push it too much on the processing.

Look at the two images above. Can you say for sure which one is a photo and which one was digitally created from scratch? Well, from the tone this article is taking I bet you could guess… The photo is the one on the right (with saturation and tonal levels dramatically changed I’m sure); the left image was created with Adobe Illustrator. But if you had not read this far it could be hard to distinguish without a closer inspection.

When you plan a photo, having already in mind some digital changes that you intend to do even before taking the shot, are you creating fine art photography or using photography to create digital art?

But what is fine art photography after all? According to the Wikipedia, fine art photography is defined as “pictures that are created to fulfill the creative vision of an individual” thus integrating any digital arrangement you might include in your work. I’ll stand with this definition. Simply putting it, digital processing exponentially increased the creativity levels you can now achieve and express with photography, but it is still photography.

And what are your thoughts? Are you creating fine art photography or digital art?