What's This?

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There's a debate raging among photographers. They are much like painters in the late 19th century who when confronted with photography were perplexed to the point of fury. Photoshop and digital post production techniques allow far greater control over an image than the photographic process every allowed. And the digital effects are replicable. So traditional photographers are dressing themselves in uniforms marked "Purist" and "Organics" to reject the photographic status of images that are post processed digitally.
People who will take multiple and purposely blurred time exposures onto exotically colored and processed film to produce prints that are heavily manipulated in the darkroom... these people will call the resultant images "photographs" yet deny that the image above is one. Odd, since I can replicate the things I have done to that image... an image by the way which presents all of the trees, paths, and the like that were there at Elk Point Maryland that afternoon, in exactly the same position where they sat. No physical things were added or subtracted from this image during processing. Yet, I'm told that I cannot call this a photograph! Odd, are photographers people in control, as I was here, or are they folks involved in a mystical process whose results they simply do not understand and cannot predict? Are photographers merely the first people to happen upon the scene of an accident?