A few months ago you photographed chairs with raindrops on, I think from outside a café? You didn't sculpt/build the chair. You didn't even put the raindrops on it. You could have taken a plain, boring shot of the chair - clearly you're image isn't trying to say "I made this chair, check it out" but it'd take some pretty fabulous lighting and framing to turn a boring old café chair into an interesting picture! Instead, you saw and chose to focus on a different view of the chair to turn something boring into something interesting. Essentially, this is no different to taking a photo of a sculpture in the Tate Modern, or the lions in Trafalgar Sq. The resulting image is fundamentally more pleasing than the source material and in that case as a photographer you added more.
If you have no objections maybe you could post it? I can't remember where it was posted!
Looking at mine, I don't think I added as much as you did - though it was specifically not my intent to add much at all - but I followed the same thought process and made the decision to present it in a way designed to maximise it's appeal as a photograph (I wasn't content with taking a "simple" record shot). I could have included the car park, the rest of the building, the builders at the nearby burger van. I could have chosen not to increase saturation to bring the colours out because it was such a crappy day. In the end I took the shot that I think would present the subject in the most appealing way, exactly the same as you did, but limited my interpretation to "I think this is really cool, framed it the best I can, check it out before it disappears" because in this case the subject itself didn't need that kind of input from the photographer.
(for the record, I think your chair shot was more interesting than mine yesterday
)I really now need to get some work done
)
