Rob Bevan's PlayTime post

"Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth. But you could argue that these techniques - and especially montage/manipulation (cf. the history of collage, Eisenstein etc, blah blah) - allow us to see other, new truths (all that nonsense about MegaWords was a joke about quantifying this). And the things you need, stock imagery, skills, tools etc. are becoming more available and affordable all the time: see all the examples of the web services* I mentioned. So we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially with the YouTube generation, and it’s also something that we (XPT and everyone else) are going to continue to have a lot of fun with…

*Most of the links to these are embedded in the PDF, but for convenience here are the best of them: Worth1000, Photoshop Tennis, iStockPhoto, Snipshot, Tourist Remover, Riya Visual Search, Lazy Mask, Zonetag, scanR, retrievr, Mappr, Ning Photos and Google Moon.

http://robbevan.com/blog/2006/11/22/playtime-playing-with-pictures/