When I first started doing art festivals in 2003 I was doing straight photography. You can still see some of those photographs in the standard sizes collection. I quickly found out that there were a lot of nature photographers and when digital came out there were many more. Not only could photographers control every aspect of creation of an image it was less expensive to take photographs in general. I did very badly at a festival once and complained to another photographer and he said, quite bluntly, "That's because your photographs look like everyone else's". I was insulted for a couple days and today I wish I remembered his name because I would like to thank him for being so blunt. I started doing panoramas (that's a story for a different blog) and I started doing digital manipulation. Most of the time it is just cropping, blurring, sharpening, taking out extra objects, and a little color saturation. I still say the hardest part is getting the right photograph to work with. These are some that I really had to work on to find the image within the photograph.
Puple Fog - Taken from inside the Jeep because of heavy fog.
Fall Forest - Camera mounted on Jeep hood, remote controlled.
Into the Mist - Create simplicty from complexity.
Windy Pink - Crop to a single branch.
See my Blog - Creation of an Image