Technical advances in digital photography are constantly taking photo manipulation to new levels. Every time you take a digital photo the possibilities open to you as an end result are more exciting than ever before. A digital photo taken of a Tuscan hillside on a cloudy day can be cropped and trimmed and digitally adjusted so that is becomes a glowing, sunny Tuscan landscape, a la Paul Cézanne, sharpened or blurred or enhanced as necessary. When the composition is esthetically pleasing to the creator, it can be enlarged and printed as a photo on canvas, adding another dimension to the implied texture of the scene.

Finally, framed and hung, these photos on canvas become works of art giving pleasure to all who see them.

Blurring the Distinction Between Photography and Painting

Before the invention of photography, original paintings were seen and admired generally only by very select groups of people - the family and friends of the artist, the artist's immediate circle of assistants or collaborators, a few art dealers, patrons, or potential buyers. People living in rural areas or far from centers of art and learning could spend an entire lifetime never having viewed an original oil painting by a talented artist. It is no surprise that some of the greatest artists of all time remained unacknowledged during their lifetimes and died without ever achieving the fame or fortune they so clearly deserved.

With the advent of photography, not only was it possible to record live subjects, but it became possible to copy works of art and distribute them as photographs to every corner of the world.

Were those reproduced images projected onto paper or other materials considered Art?

The artist-inventors who applied the principles of light and optics to come up with the first photographs obviously thought so. And the people who viewed these first "reproductions" clearly thought so too. Photography changed people's conceptions of what art is and brought painted art to the masses, to the benefit of all of us today.