“Maybe, these days, the ques­tion isn’t “What is a pho­to­graph?”; it’s “What is real­ity?” touts David Pogue, an NY Times’ cel­e­brated tech­nol­ogy colum­nist in his per­sonal tech column.

Pogue enlisted 14 things we do to and for our pho­tographs; in real­ity, we do much, much more than what he sug­gested; just like how we care our pets to the ends of man­i­cures & fash­ion, enough is never enough.

Particularly, I was (have always been) intrigued by this very topic in pho­tog­ra­phy. Photography itself, is a fab­ri­ca­tion of real­ity for­mu­lated by the lights and optics in a man­made device called cam­era; in the dig­i­tal age, the pro­jected image that we see on-screen is an illu­sion of dig­i­tal sig­nals with mil­lions of color com­bi­na­tion as the result of a com­plex com­putional cal­cu­la­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion & manip­u­la­tion of ana­log data.

In sim­ple terms, what you see on-screen is a pro­jected dig­i­tal real­ity of an ana­log objects.

Coming to the heart of the mat­ter, com­pe­ti­tions, awards & pub­lic recog­ni­tion are the most sought-after prize a pho­tog­ra­pher could hope for, so impor­tant to some, they would go to the length of uneth­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of real­ity, break­ing the holy-grail of ethics for those who are the eyes & ears to the pub­lic to win the hearts of the pub­lic. Such inci­dent hap­pen today when World Press Photo win­ner, Stepan Rudik was dis­qual­i­fied for alter­ing the con­tent of his win­ning image. World Press Photo:

“The con­tent of the image must not be altered. Only retouch­ing which con­forms to the cur­rently accepted stan­dards in the indus­try is allowed.”

What remains is our moral capac­ity to say enough is enough, leave it to the eyes of the peo­ple to see, or judge for them­selves for the real­ity they want to believe. There are things that you can change, adjust; that is us and the way we can cope with the moment and our vul­ner­a­ble ego, I often found that when I don’t get the image I want, it sim­ply isn’t meant to be, great things hap­pen when we just sur­ren­der and let the event unfold nat­u­rally. Our alter­ation before or after the image was cap­ture would only devalue it.

From the archive: One sum­mer in Shanghai, circa 1999 © Will Wiriawan