> From: graywolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Had to think about that for a bit. But then it came to me that the guys who make > catalog sketches and such are considered artists. > > So why not photographers? Maybe because of the perception that anybody can do > it? But then that is not true. Anybody can draw lines on paper but that does not > make them an artist. It is only when the lines mak a meaningful picture that the > person is considered an artist.
I've always thought that the problem it is pretty hard to make a photograph of something that did not PHYSICALLY exist at the moment you triggered the shutter. You can imagine an elephant with 5 legs and paint it, but to photograph such a thing you'd actually have to make one somehow, or alter the photo after taking it. You can do tricky things with light that create an effect captured on film that never existed at one time in the real world, or multiple-exposure stuff, but "straight" photography is fairly limited by physical reality, which is not the case with other arts. It is what makes photography unique as an art form, and so misunderstood and underappreciated. BTW Canon makes some sort of digital signature kit for their DSLRs that does some kind of checksum which supposedly guarantees that the image data has not been altered due to the difficulty of producing an altered data set with the same checksum. It's still probably easier to spoof than a negative. DJE
