[pjflan7]

absolutely not cheating........The whole intent of photography is the photographer trying to capture a certain scene or essence or whatever and convey that to others or just his or her own pleasure. That is why we have so many styles of photography.....some do people, some nature, some astronomy, some the abstract, some architectural etc......but what really gets me regarding the "purists" is that they use filters like the rest of us.....that is intentionally changing the scene.....polarizing takes glare off of what is there.....glare is undesirable so we remove it......that's cheating if we want to go there. Cropping is essentially another form of change....dodging and burning is cheating......we create what we want.....be it dodging and burning, enhancing contrast, saturation color, airbrushing blemishes off portraits.....We would have to throw out filters of every type, throw out photoshop....everything if we were to be consistent with the purist philosophy......which by the way I don't believe has ever been purely pure!