For once, I'm soliciting opinions on this one. It's what you might call a hand-crafted HDR project. There's an arbitrary line that I drew when I bought my D200 to start shooting digitally. That line was "things I can do in the darkroom or with film choice will be called photography, all other digital trickery shall be known as digital art." At the time, digital art (in my mind, anyway) included things such as removing poles, wires, trees, etc. from an otherwise pleasing composition. It grew to include changing eye color, excessive skin blending and pimple removal. Photography would include the use of grain effects, vignetting, burning and dodging, color saturation and contrast control.
Over the course of the summer, I began creating digital art portraits by fixing skin problems, removing pimples and the like. Layers and Gaussian blur and the eraser tool and the spot healing brush became my friend. And as with all offers by the Dark One, it was so easy, so sweet...just a tweak here or a bit there. (No, I don't really believe there's a Dark One, but it's a nice metaphor.)
But then, I started to look at HDR. If you don't know, HDR involves combining a few exposures into one to create a look that matches what you saw at the scene, so that a building and the sky can have equal intensity, even if they don't on the base exposure that you shot. Most often, though, you notice it in ridiculously unreal photos. I haven't found a program that's simple for me to use (I'm on my 3rd or 4th program), so I thought I'd make this one by hand in Photoshop Elements.
I combined three exposures shot just after sunset - one to get the sky a nice, rich color, one to make the hills and the fortress well exposed and one to get just the right color in the sea. All the colors you see are as they were...enhanced with a bit of saturation, but less enhanced than if I'd used a tobacco filter with film. In the process of making layer upon layer of parts, erasing some bits, blurring lines so they aren't too sharp, but not blurring them so much that it's obvious, I stepped across my line. Everything that you see in the piece was there...and nothing was removed from the photo...but I have a sick feeling in my heart as I stand up and say, "Hello, my name is Brian N., and I have committed digital art."
Now, if you're still with me, was it worth my soul, my integrity, my moral collapse? (Yes, I do think of it in such dramatic terms.) Do you, my audience, enjoy it? You can validate me or not, complain about the technique, the skills employed. But I do want to hear what others think. I'll tell you what I think...I like it. It's rough around the edges, but for a first serious effort it's not bad. And I can see where, once I get better at the process and work more cleanly, it might be worth my soul, my integrity, my moral compass.