Not all mirrorless cameras are also shutterless cameras. My Canon R5 will take photos without the shutter, but I rarely use it despite the fact that it gives 20 fps. I have no problem with the chunk and just 12 FPS using the shutter.

I am qualified to judge my own perception. I make no demands that other people have my view. However, I do make the demand that because my view may not be others’ view, I am not attacked or marginalized for having it.

However, I mentioned nothing about being a “master”. You added that to the discussion.

. Or, HOW MUCH TIME HE SPENT MANIPULATING THE IMAGE!

I beg your pardon. I share my life with you and you put it down as another sterile discussion. Perhaps you need to take your hands away from your eyes instead of keeping them there, and complaining that you cannot see.

A little known fact. Ansel Adams spent as much time in the fluids darkroom as any of us do in the digital one. His photos are all heavily modified. Perhaps you knew that.

I started photography by taking what looked like interesting artistic photos in film.

Then I became a wedding and portrait PHOTOGRAPHER in film. Here my work started to blur into art. People never liked their photos and always wanted to look better so I had to arrange light conditions which avoided any stark looks.

After about 6 years as a wedding/portrait PHOTOGRAPHER, I was essentially burned out, and only took travel photos and photos of the kids, returning to being just a photographer.

With the advent of digital, and then increasingly complex digital editing, my photography became PHOTOGRAPHY again. And now, people look at my photos and the first thing they say after “Oh WOW!” is, “Nice Painting....Oh wait, that’s a photograph.... I wonder how he did that."

I have moved into ART. My photographs are the way I want to see the subject, not necessarily the way it is in fact. Mirrorless, focus merge, and extensive digital editing allow me to do this. And, in my mind, I became a PHOTOGRAPHER once again.

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.

In 55 years of using Canon, I have never had a battery swell. My head swells sometimes but not the battery.

None of it makes any difference. Most people are stuck in film days anyhow. Most people don’t have any realization of the benefits of digital in taking photos, and in editing. And beyond that, most wanna-bee photographers are stuck in taking pictures of their vacation and calling it art(even if its not their vacation).

I went with my iPhone for everyday photo pictures. And then.... Topaz came out with 3.0. And with the ability to make dramatic AI(read increased pixels, not just bigger or more contrast) changes, I went back to my Canon R5 for photography on everyday events.

I have moved to simply the 24-240 and the 800/1120 in the canon world.

Unless one needs to do batch processing, Topaz 3.01”s ability to use AI to fix sharpening, enlarging, and denoising has changed the game. I do not more lenses. OK, I do have a true wide angle for astro, and a manual 150mm macro for macro. But other than these two specialized tools, you can now fix digitally anything. Take the 180-400(or someone like her), and get a very long one for wildlife that is far away.

I used to own one of these. I sold it in 2003; but digital had already taken hold of the professional portrait and wedding markets, and the only person I could find was someone in the north of Canada.

It surely made a giant noise.

It's funny. When I was a wedding photographer back in the 80’s and 90’s, I needed it to separate myself as THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER---AND THE giant Mamiya did that. Now with everyone using a smart phone, just having a regular camera separates one out as THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER. Although I am long retired from that.

I actually came upon this fairly recently. I have been taking photos in many genres for more than 50 years. I moved to Mount Desert Island to retire 13 years ago when I was 62, with the intent of specializing in landscape. But I found that there were many people here already who were lots better than me, and who were willing to go places and get up at times that at my age I could no longer do. And so I specialized in macro and close-up. I called my photo group “Hidden Images Photography”. But over a fairly short time I augmented my editing skills on these digital images to the point that when I showed them to people, they started saying “Oh Wow!” And so I changed my group to “Oh Wow!. And now I’m pretty sure what formula is likely to cause people to say “Oh Wow!” when they see them.

Recently, I had a show of just me at the Jesup Library in Bar Harbor(Maine). I heard a lot of that phrase.

My son works in IT for Hubspot(a good way to make use of his PhD in experimental nuclear physics) as a Senior Software Engineer, level 3. But in a previous employer he worked for a group that provided AI’s who answered questions for banks. The company had some work to do as a result of this funny story.

Someone called and got the AI, but was not happy with the answers being provided and said, “You seem to think this is humorous!”. Whereupon the AI said, “NO, but I do know some good banker jokes, would you like to hear one?” This sent the customer over the top and he started swearing at the AI. Finally the AI got the idea that the customer was upset, and said, “I think you need to talk to a real human being, I will connect you to my human supervisor.” But the customer would have none of it and responded with, “Don’t you try to get out of this by pretending that your bad behavior came from being a robot. You clearly aren’t a robot, you are an insolent employee, and I’m going to tell your supervisor exactly what I think of you.”

It took the human supervisor some time to calm down the customer.

I agree. It's just a photo of a woman without some clothing. Somebody’s girlfriend, perhaps. I have seen and have in my collection many photos that are clearly “Oh Wow!” glamour. Peter Gowland used to do many of them back in the 1960’s.