Hobbyist photographer with a Nikon D5100.

I started doing photography in the late '70s (I was 10, and got a Minolta SR-1 from my father when he bought a Nikon F), but shelved the hobby in the late '80s. Picked it up again last year, this time with digital equipment.

Philosophically, I think photography is not much about representing reality. Although there is a subbranch of photography that does specialize in representing reality faithfully, those photos tend to be fairly dull (think passport photos or surveillance cameras).

To quote The Luminous Landscape:

The problem with reality is that it is often far too real.

When photos are for entertainment, art or decoration (as opposed to documentation), we don't want reality. We want drama, interesting colors, attention-grabbing tableaus. Or black-and-white subjects hunched over against the storm while trundling across an endless bleak plain, but in any case something that differs from day-to-day reality in some interesting way.

So I consider photography to be just as much about photoshopping as it is about wielding a camera. Whether you get a particular effect in camera or through software doesn't matter much. That's just a technicality, and the choice between in-camera and in-post boils down to what's the simplest way to achieve any given effect.