thereyougo!
Been spending a lot of time on here!
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I think it is important to note that around the time photography became a "thing" the world of the painter started to shift dramatically. Photographs were able to capture and record the visual world with greater accuracy and because of this many painters began exploring much more abstract avenues of self expression. And there were plenty of people painters and non painters alike who didn't like the shift.
The same can be said for film and digital photography I think. As we move further into the digital age and cgi becomes more powerful.. A photographer of his/her times is going to be one who embraces the shift and explores the unreality of photography... We've had decades of exploring the reality.
We know there are things that seem to be universally pleasant in an image... Artists have been building that store of classical knowledge for generations. Posing, lighting, shadows, gesture, ratios... On and on in an eon of iterative advancement. The challenge, from the "of their times" perspective is not in replicating the past, but rather in crafting the future. What universally pleasant things haven't we found yet? What else works? What's the next step?
Rome is the mob... Fickle and bored. What will you do the day you realize you are no longer culturally relevant? When the product you are creating is outdated and outmoded? If you don't have your finger on the pulse of the society around you and you openly criticize where the society is taking the medium, how do you expect to continue selling to them? How do you expect to grow when you speak in definitives about a medium that isn't even fully born yet?
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I admire you for typing that on a mobile device, mine would have been full of auto(in)corrects.
However, I disagree with you. Who decides who is 'culturally relevant'. And should those that are 'culturally irrelevant' care a fig about it? Art shouldn't be defined by technology, and it is kind of sad that technology is too often seen as being more important. We've seen what technology has done to music - how many people think that people sing the way they do on 'Glee' and High School Musical? That for me is the musical equivalent of HDR and hyper sharp images. They grate. They are like fingernails down a black board. Not only that, there is no smooth gradation. Overuse of autotune in music and the overuse of computer tools in photography rids us of the smooth gradation.
Selective focus is a compositional tool, and making things hyper sharp so the whole scene is hyper sharp won't make the scene look more real or '3D'. A 2D image is just that. We can use shadows and softer focus to make an image more pleasing, and in many ways have more shape.
In art we have the ability to interpret an image and by using compositional tools (including not all of the image being tack sharp), we can guide our viewers to our interpretation. We should be guiding them through, not scratching their eyes out with oversharp images that don't look realistic. Think of bad HDR/tonemapping and that's where we will end up with sharpening...