For me, the taking of any shot is akin to taking detailed notes of what one saw and found interesting, from whatever perspective one thought appropriate or interesting.
The art is in the process of applying the Photoshop techniques, and/or printing techniques according to one's skills, to such detailed notes (Raw files), in order to create (or as Isaac would say, 'give form to') the emotional experience that motivated one to take the shot in the first instance.
Actually, I have an admission: that has become photography for me since I started playing digital games.
And it sucks. It's partly why I can't really get my head back into making pictures that I honestly want to make. In order to do that, I'd have to be able to make all the calls before clicking the shutter: transparencies. Now, I get the exposure about right - whatever the hell that concept currently is (you see the corruption of the medium?), and play monitor games over a cup of coffee or coldish tea. Jeez, I don't even have to think lighting. It's photography by numbers; it's what Patrick Lichfield supposedly discovered shortly before he died; it's part of what destroyed Bob Carlos Clarke. For Lichfield, fake location grafts meant the end of his trips abroad and for Clarke, the redundancy of his printing exepertise. Cool shit; don't we love it? Please, no friggin' buggy-whip nonsense? It's more important than that.
Rob C