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Originally Posted by frad-ster
I am with ya on this one. On one image, good old Ansel Adams probably spent 10 times the amount of time in the darkroom than most of us take in PS to do the standard set of levels and color corrections. It's not a betrayal, but rather a technological advantage to photography today.
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The difference is that Ansel Adams spent a long time studying his equipment, understanding optics and exposure and then a spent more time studying his subjects and planning his shot - all before going into the dark room to tweak his images - which he certainly did.
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I would also like to note that graphics design is considered an art in many ways. Using PS to create things and make them what your imagination sees is not cheap, it's resourceful! 
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While that is true the whole point of photography is not create a picture in Photoshop but rather to create one in the camera. In order to do that you need to learn how the camera see light, how particular lenses give different perspectives and their particular flaws so you can avoid or exploit those when needed.
This is not an indictment on digital postprocessing - postprocessing is, and has always been, an important part of the art of photography (do you really think dodge and burn did not exist before Photoshop, think again). This is a legitimate process of enhancing a good photograph to look it's best because as Wulf said, cameras have a limited capacity to capture a scene.
This is an indictment on the mentality that what you do on the camera is not as important because it can always be fixed later on Photoshop. No, it can't! In my opinion, Photoshop is not a tool to rescue (in some cases completely remake) a grossly bad shot, but rather a tool to correct minor flaws and enhance colors, contrast and other areas.
The original poster had a legitimate photographic question dealing with the different distorsions introduced by the lens system itself. The first photo suffers from Barrel Distorsion caused by the 18mm portion of his lens system, the second has this plus Curvilinear Distorsion caused by the upward angle of the camera. None of these are problems with the photographic technique.
Barrel distorsion is an optical flaw mostly present in wide angle zooms and is more pronounced with wider zomming ranges. Most prime lenses of equivalent focal length and shorter zooms (e.i., 10-22mm) will exhibit lesser (sometimes negligible) distorsions.