"Who gives a flying f%&K whether he doctors, manipulates, combines or blends frames to come up with his shots? I certainly don't. You either like his stuff or you don't. You like the guy or you don't.
With all due respect some of the posters on this thread need to get out more / take more photographs / be more personally creative / get a girlfriend (delete as applicable)."
Once again, the issue isn't manipulation of the image, post-processing or any of those things. Listen carefully: many people believe that if you're going to write up a breathless epiphany about what you did to capture a photo, it ought to contain some semblance of the truth about what you did to capture the photo. The problem here isn't manipulation of the image or images, it's the disingenuous description that seems clearly to be designed to create the false impression that the image consists of one click, one photo. Several dozen posters have rather convincingly described why that cannot be so.
I'm quite OK with the notion that if you choose to talk, what you say ought to be true. Whoever pointed out the difference between declaring you're the King of England, vs. merely taking a photo of yourself wearing a crown, made the point quite well. And I don't think I need to be a professional (which I'm not) to have the right to an opinion about the need for some basic integrity, even among obvious self-promoters.