Is Photography Art?

The question is about photography being art.  I think much of photography today is merely capturing moments and not really artistic expression.  And then there are those who take photography to a new level of artistic expression.  Tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator help to make photography more than just capturing a moment in time but also manipulating it into a work of art beyond what the camera actually sees.  I have fallen in love with this part of creative expression, taking photos of children and incorporating them into new and different environments and fantasy settings. 

I started with just fairies.  I really love fairy tales.  I really love children.  It only seems natural that they two should marry into something different and beautiful, don’t you think?  So I started adding butterfly and dragonfly wings and making fairy photos. 

Then I made some water pixies but putting the children at the bottom of the ocean.  Really fun. 

That’s when my sister asked if I could make her grandson on a dinosaur.  I hadn’t even thought of it.  I thought it would be much more difficult to find and photography a dinosaur than it was to photography a butterfly.  But I was wrong there.  People have been fascinated with dinosaurs for a really long time and made statues, sculptures, and models of dinosaurs just begging for a photographer to come along.  The results are fun and fascinating.

So have I become a traitor to the pure devotion of art by spending 6 to 10 hours creating these photo manipulations and composites?  I don’t think so. 

What do you think?