I suppose I shouldn't poke my nose into a subject I know nothing about. But I do know I've been taking snappy snaps of buildings round here. I take them because I find something interesting about the building. When I get it back from Boots it obviously looks nothing like how I 'saw' it. But I'm then able to take the photo and do a drawing or painting from it, and recapture something about what it 'said' to me at the time. Some things I leave out, some things are exaggerated - to show how I saw it in my head, with whatever preconceptions I have with me. I don't think that's cheating? And photography's just another art, is it not? Nothing like that's objective. Even if you try to do a draftsman's version, or whatever, it's still presenting certain aspects of the scene and leaving out others. It all depends what you think's important.

~or am I missing your point. Perhaps this is just an argument about cameras.

Or the carefully crafted lies of someone in a chatroom ;-)

"For that matter no photograph developed without tweaks will give you something that is there in nature."

You can get lucky if you have the right eqp't tho.

Taking pictures of rocks for instance, sometimes with the correct light I can capture the exact texture and colour (to the average eye) of the rock in front of me, straight from the RAW file.

Example:

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/25337

Without a grad filter you can see the sky is overexposed as I exposed correctly for the rock and lichen but the strong light in the sky makes it physically (as always) impossible at that angle to expose for both at once.

The rock/vegetation colours are spot-on straight from the camera, I was lucky is all.

One *could* bring the sky detail back in with some levels work (witchcraft) or even better, a double exposure overlay taken at the same time. Of course that would upset the trolls so we are left with 'no sky' but at least it is 'true' (read false).

Seriously speaking, I think one can capture elements of what is there (visually) in nature within a frame, but in order to calculate the exposure correctly for a whole field of vision, you need to use extra tools either pre-click or post click. No matter what PeterH says, you cannot get around a distorting wide-angle or an overexposed midday sky or backlight without using extra tools otherwise the result looks nothing like the original view.