My interest in photography goes right back to 1955 when, at Brighton Technical School, I joined the school camera club. Those were the days of contact printing, printing out paper etc and a huge wooden enlarger made in the carpentry workshop with the lens and condenser provided by a professional photographer, the father of one of the pupils

Many people erroneously believe manipulating of photographs began with the invention of Photoshop and similar software programmes for altering digital images. In fact manipulating images goes right back to the birth of photography and took many forms such as concocting different recipes of film developers, selectively scraping areas of the developed plate to "retouch" the photograph etc.

The advent of digital photography brought exponential developments as did the development of software to produce art digitally. I am using the term manipulation to cover the entire breadth of digital manipulation ranging from making simple minor adjustments to completely altering the image to something bearing little or no resemblance to the original, including mimicing processes used during conventional darkroom wet processing. The only limit is the individuals imagination and creativity.