I’ve done, sports, news, politics and landscapes. With sports, news and politics we have to maintain the link to what is real. With landscapes, I’ve always felt it is art and we can manipulate to our artistic vision.

While Ansel didn’t replace skies, he did an incredible amount of manipulation in the darkroom. I was a poor imitation of Ansel in the darkroom back in the day, I used to hike with a 4x5 view camera. And I love what I can do in software now.

Back in the day, there was a vigorous discussion on nature photography. Most nature photography that had animals were set up using game preserve animals. If you sold to Hunting or Nature magazines the pressure to produce new images was very hard to meet if you didn’t.

I remember Marty Stoufer’s “Wild America” show on PBS, after he ripped through decades of film in two seasons he started using staged scenes, when PBS found out, they canceled him. I understood how hard it is to film in the wild, and understood why he did and I thought PBS was being overly “pure”. There was of course the famous Disney scene with lemmings running over a cliff, lemmings don’t do that. But they had it on film, so generations of us grew up believing lemmings did actually follow the leader over cliffs.

So I think your question is really documentation photography vs art photography. Personally I think replacing skies is too much and almost always noticeable and screams fake. The image below was taken during a sunny blue sky day. I bumped up the tower and darken the sky. And I removed all the tourists. This was my vision and fair game. Bytheway, this is the Wright Brothers Tower at Kitty Hawk, I wanted to show the bright tower pointing to dark skies with a bright future going forward.