This is a very precise question and about the analogue vs digital workflow. It is about 'le métier'. It is not only about crayons vs oil paint.....
Story about my time as engineer: We had a drawing office. When we had a design we went to the drawing office. 20 Draftsmen standing on slanted tables fiddling around with Steadler or Rotring pens and pigment inkt. A week later we commented on the drawing with a red pencil and returned the corrected drawing to the drawing office. In the cafeteria we laughed about the brainless draftsmen and had an arsenal of jokes how design could go wrong thanks to drawing errors. Then, the PC came and AutoCAD dropped a massive pile of 'new' work on our table. The better draftsmen became poor engineers and the good engineers became poor auto cad designers.
Recognize the story?
I remember standing in de que waiting in the lab to get the uncut mid formats and holding it on the light table, selecting and marking up with my marker en eventually direct ordering prints of the clear winners. Week later judging the prints and pushing them back over the counter with a 'how is this possible' attitude.
And then , the PC came and AutoCAD Photoshop dropped a massive pile of 'new' work on our table. The better draftsmen photographers became poor engineers Post Processors and the good engineers keen photoshoppers became poor auto cad designers Photographers.
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Thank you Ivo; you and Oscar got it from the beginning.
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"So where is photography today, for those of us not doing it for the money?
I think that, in general, it has become a very different beast, with its prime objective no longer that little - or large - piece of photographic paper bearing testimony to the pleasure or expression of artistic appreciation a moment once gave, a feeling strong enough to make us knowingly expend time, effort and money in pursuit of it; I think it has become another creature altogether, one far more light, that seeks only to be remembered for five seconds at best.
Having written that is not to preclude those who simply use the medium as they did or would have done with film, from just going on as before, creating pictures that they love and enjoy, regardless of medium.
What has altered, though, is that for both kinds of photographer, the opportunity for experimentation is far greater than ever it was. And I think that's the crucial aspect: one should learn to forget about the innate characteristics of film grain and so forth, and just use the digital route for what it offers instead, which is low cost, unlimited opportunity to mess about, and within a different photographic experience altogether. It's in the constant comparison of one medium with the other that the older photographer might find continuing frustration.
The musical analogy with score and the interpretation of it has never been more relevant than today, where our chances of coming up with a pleasing, personal take on something is far higher than it was before the advent of digital. Instead of wasting expensive sheets of paper, test strips notwithstanding, we can today sit on our collective ass, look at a screen and alter, adapt, add, subract and lie through our visual teeth until we reach the point where we feel we may have accomplished something worth showing.
Unfortunately though, none of this alters the fact that we will always need to have somethig inside us that we can express visually. If that's not there, we are left as voiceless as ever we were.
So yes, I think photograhy is now something else, and that its "drawing with light" sentiment is of the past, more drawing been done in the computer than in any camera."
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I took the opportunity of quoting the above part of the OP.
Even a rapìd reading of it should illustrate just how little understood it has been, and how diverted the discussion that followed became. It turned into a fight about tools and how similar tools are insofar as cameras are concerned, said similarity of them becoming the topic in the mind of some, rather than the topic being about what it had been meant to be: about
the heart and the soul of the practice and where it could be, and seems to be going today.
Perhaps that's not really surprising. I don't think that matters to very many people, not just here, but, with rare exceptions, anywhere in "photography" as found in the Internet.
Perhaps it was a mistake to start a thread on a topic which is actually fairly close to the topic of art, therefore difficult in the extreme to change from a thought in the mind to words on a page: it is not literary, it is visceral.
I won't close this thread, because I'm sure it has space to run, and some may enjoy that. But for myself, I think I have tried to express my point of view on the matter as clearly as I can, and that is obviously not well enough, so I don't see a lot of point repeating myself until we all fall asleeep.
Rob