What is Photography

Call it vision, imagination, or seeing; it all comes down to the same thing: the ability to envision a final result in your mind's eye, and then to make it so with your tools at hand.

It's never been about the gear. It's always been about seeing something, knowing how you want it to look, and making it so. Making it so is the easy part; seeing it in the first place is what makes a photographer. Powers of observation are everything. Snapping a camera is trivial.

Photography and painting are the same. Each renders imagination in tangible form. The difference is that painters can work completely from imagination, although most of us work from life as a starting point. Both can take lifetimes to master the tools to render imaginations exactly as we intend. With inkjet printing (giclée is the term stolen from painting), they are identical in that each of us is using tools to apply our imagination as physical colors to flat media, often canvas.