Current cell phone cameras have very few controls and are extremely difficult to hold steady. So that makes them both simple and difficult at the same time. The result is a lot of mediocre quality pictures being taken by millions of unskilled people.
Not a complaint, just an observation. Perhaps it is an obscure observation as per the blog sub title. Many people love their “digital snapshots” so I have no desire to make everyone a professional photographer. It is just not a requirement. The same was probably said when the first Kodak camera made personal photography accessible.
I love digital photography. I am old enough to have started with film cameras. I have no reason to go back to film. I know I have produced some very good photography with film, but the image control now available with digital beats anything in film except for very large format negatives or original positives.
I have nearly 10,000 digital photos on my computer. Probably far less than half are unique. This simply indicates I can afford to take multiple digital shots and later choose which ones are my keepers. With film shooting I was far more miserly and selective of each exposure, not wanting to “waste” film and development time and cost. Those days are gone.
My interest is in the technical image quality as well as composition of the image. I separate photographic art from pure technical image capture but I don’t declare one superior or exclusive to the other.
Cropping and editing are an integral part of the final presented image. For me everything does not have to happen in the camera. Darkroom processing (manipulation) has long been a step in the process to finished image.
There is also an art style I call “trick” photography where images are modified (edited) from the real life captured state. Removing blemishes is called retouching. That is a very minor trick. I have removed fire alarms switches from walls in wedding photographs where they distracted from the image.
Changing complete heads or adding/deleting people is more tricky than retouching but some edits are not intended to be realistic. They are just part of the creative fun.
I don’t have a personal rule that photography has to be WYSIWYG (Whizzy-wig – What you see (in life) is what you get). It’s more like WYSIWISY. (whizzy-wisy– What you see is what I show you.) The art of good photography is in the presentation. It is what makes viewing an image a total new, fresh, engaging or exciting experience. There is an almost unlimited number of ways to achieve that goal. It doesn’t always have to be a great subject. A bug on a flower can be as good a subject as a sunset in the Grand Canyon.
My photographic desire is perfect focal and light image control (camera and lens) combined with captivating subject composition and presentation. Oh, and having fun doing that over and over.