I don't happen to use a teleconverter because I don't do small birds. But a teleconverter would have let you focus more easily on the bird and not the stump. That alone would have gotten you off on the right foot.

A D850 does not start out with a 30MP image unless you cropped from 45MP it in the camera (I can do that with the Z7 but I don't crop any further). 9MP is only 1/5th of what the camera can capture at full frame.

As for making hasty assumptions, I am nearly 12 years older than you and I know more about this than you will twelve years from now, if you study it really hard.

You are correct, if the commissioned artist is established enough to command the freedom to paint (or photograph) on his own terms. For instance, if you asked van Gogh to paint your portrait. But he would have given you a van Gogh portrait, which may or may not have been what you had in mind. It would be the same thing if you contracted Annie Leibovitz to do a photographic portrait of you. But it would be her vision of your portrait, not yours. Very few brides would hire a photographer on those terms.

This has been an ongoing discussion this year with an artist who doesn't consider photography to be art at all.

If one is documenting ones life with visual pictures, then everyone has the right to do that. If one is documenting stories of culture and civilization, then I suppose that is street photography. But most people who do think that just taking photos of the street is documenting culture and civilization.

Deep meaning personally and documented for oneself is fine and its called photography(all lowercase letters). Photos that groups of people will say “Oh WOW!” in whatever genre is called PHOTOGRAPHY(uppercase letters).

In my experience over 55 years of shows and presentations, most people are photographers, who want to believe they are PHOTOGRAPHERS.

There are examples of photography and PHOTOGRAPHY here on Ugly. Most of it is the former.