Title • hanging out

Ok, so we've had a discussion about the merits (or otherwise) of photographing other people's 'art', so I wondered what your thoughts were on editing out – i.e. removing – bits/sections of an image to produce a 'better' end result. As you all know, I'm not overly concerned about the extent to which an image has been post-processed – we've had that discussion numerous times – but I don't think we've talked much about selectively removing sections of an image. What I've never done is add something to an image that wasn't there in the original (e.g. pasting in the sky from another shot), and I don't much like cropping, at least not extensively, but I don't mind removing the odd distracting detail or two. In this case though I've removed two sections of text to dramatically alter the image, at least I think it dramatically alters it.

The original, if you're interested, is here:

.../archives/hanging_out.php

Anyway, and as always, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.