About Hello Kitty, the Eyes on You photo contest winner . . .

[Gato Moteado]

54. and, here i just thought you had a goofy looking cat...

...but didn't want to mention that and insult the poor thing! i'm somewhat relieved to know that the cat is normal.

i'm glad andy shook things up by pushing the indiscriminate boundaries. i think it's OK to have boundaries (regulations) in a contest, but, to my knowledge, there were none that would have disqualified andy's photo. it sounds like most people want some boundaries, and that's OK, but how do you define them? will only jpgs straight out of the camera be acceptable entries?

i've had the same discussion, that is happening here, with friends and fellow photographers. i think, as andy or someone pointed out in the thread, that most people are ok with some manipulation of an image but it's a matter of where they draw the line, and everyone has their own line. the reality of it is, everyone is OK with manipulation and distortion in photography, though most don't realize that they are. first of all, a photograph takes a 3-dimensional view of something in the physical world and compresses it to 2 dimensions. i mean, right off the bat, we are doing more image manipulation there than putting a smile on a cat. also, depending on what the focal length of your lens is, you'll get different types of distortion in your image and, also, more or less depth of field (i mean, we don't see the bokeh that we see in a photograph when looking at the same scene with our eyes).

i certainly draw a line on image manipulation with documentary style photography (photojournalism, nature photography, etc), but even with "acceptable" forms of manipulation (exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc), i can't really articulate where that line is; i wouldn't know how to define how much is too much. with artistic photography, i'd say there are no boundaries.