more often than not you would choose your next travel destination by the photographs you see of the place.  but how do you know if the image you are looking at is a true representation of that place in real life?  would you be upset if you arrived to a destination and it wasn’t anything like what you saw online or in travel destination books?  I know I would (and it certainly has happened)!

and yes, real travel books still do exist.

Lonely Planet

however, there are a fair number of travel photographs out there today that have certainly been edited (both very well and very poorly).  but should photos even be allowed to be edited in the first place?

there are those that would argue against any type of editing of photographs of travel destinations.  there are also those that are in favor of editing.  many I believe would be a proponent of slight editing, because a camera cannot always capture an image exactly how your eye sees it.  I am going to go out on a limb here and state that many would be against extreme editing (entirely possible of course with the now abundant amount of applications available for smartphones to adjust photographs posted to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter).  I myself am a victim of editing a photo so that it looks “cooler” on Instagram (I mean, the filters and editing capabilities they have on there now really are amazing).

unedited photo of Ireland:

edited photo of Ireland:

looks a little nicer edited doesn’t it?  to be fair though, the bottom photograph resembles more of what it actually looked like to the naked eye (I might have heightened the saturation just a little bit more than was necessary) rather than what was captured with my iPhone camera lens in the photograph above it.

but what about the folks that couldn’t care less about true representation (I would like to think this is what is referred to as honesty) and simply want to have amazing photographs associated with their name that others will envy them for?  to be considered “cool” because they can produce “amazing” images on a screen that are in no way actually factual.  I know you have seen the photographs I speak of on Instagram…

so when is editing ok and when is it not ok?