I'm just throwing this out there to add to the conversation.

What about the limitations of the camera (digital or film) when it comes to taking a photograph of a very contrasty scene, such as a sunset. The camera can only record 4-5 stops of light before it blocks up the shadows, or blows out the highlights, but the human eye can see about 8 stops of light. So in a scene with a lot of contrast, the camera isn't going to be able to capture everything you see.

There are a couple ways to solve this problem. You could us a split ND filter to ballance the scene. You could take several photos and combine them in PS, or take a single RAW image and process it mutliple times and combine those images. If I did this with the filter, and captured the entire scene as I saw it in camera, does it make it more of a photograph than if I did it with PS? Either way the end result is closer to what I saw in real life, and isn't the end result the most important thing?