KIM SHAPLEY - I'm a keen amateur photographer, currently working as an IT Consultant for Telstra, Australia's premier Telecommunications company. I´m into Broomball which is similar to ice hockey. I love to travel and have been lucky enough to have been able to use Broomball as the excuse (who really needs one anyway) to travel to North America, Europe and Asia and plan to do much much more.

Working as an IT consultant, I am as you would expect pretty familiar with computers. That of course begs the question on how much manipulation my photographs have had in the computer. Well yes there is some, but I think it's minimal.

So what do I or have I done to manipulate the images. I'll manipulate the brightness and contrast on an image and perform some cropping. Some images do require some scratch removal which I'll do on the PC. I might enhance the colour and saturation to a minor degree to get the best out of the photo, none of which are adding information or subtracting it in any substantial form, beyond what you would normally expect from a photograph.

My images are what I term, "reality" images. I see images as they appear to you and me, not some digitally enhanced surrealist view of the world. I've seen images (nicely done by the way) that show additional people in the photo, or remove unwanted objects that clutter the photo, or adding additional objects or people to make a photograph, much more that it was originally. That's digital art, not photography.

If I may be permitted to steal a quote (by Alfred Steilglitz)

"I do not object to retouching, dodging. or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique."