What the process does, is add the personality of the photographer/artist to the final image. The combination of a good image with the processes that are the forte of the particular photographer is what gives the photographer's unique voice to the image. Arguing over the process is the game of technicians, arguing over the image is the game of artists.
Jorge, you consistently value process over image
You are wrong, I value the process that makes the image superlative over image only with no regard to process just because I can dodge pixel by pixel. I sell photographs, and as such I like to think people buy them because of the image content, not just because they were printed in pt/pd. All that pt/pd does to my prints is add a tactile and depth quality I have not seen on any fauxtograph. I would add to your last post that arguing over the image and process is the game of the true photographer.
Why use "photography" at all, when it bears only a superficial resemblance to any photographic process?
Digital photography does share a number of common things with photographic processes. Whether those are essential or superficial is your own judgement call. But remember that there are very fundamental differences between Computer Science and Science as well. Also, to take another example, most people would say that East Palo Alto (used to be the US small town "crime capital" to the point that the city council wanted to change the name to erase bad memories) and Palo Alto (one of the nicest Silicon Valley towns) are not the same.
Tell you what QT, if everyone who incorporates digital into their process begins to call what they do digital photography, call their prints digital photographs, and to call themselves digital photographers, I will relent.
I'm not going to hold my breath. Digital users do not want that distinction made.
If you guys were taxonomists, this would be the endless argument of the "lumpers vs. splitters"...
Systematists argue about whether closely related species should be in the same taxonomic class or not, but they do NOT argue about whether two similar species with different evolutionary histories should be considered the same species. On this they are entirely in agreement. Its called convergent evoloution, and photography and digital imaging clearly evolved independant of each other.
I was pointing to the analogies of the argument, not the process. The test of speciation is reproductive isolation, and I would argue that traditional and digital are interfertile, but incipiently speciating, and that what you have is parallelism, not convergence...The analogies of the processes of traditional and digital photographies vs speciation are not a good fit, although you can draw them depending on how broad or loose you make definitions.
In no way are traditional and digital imaging independent of one another; we are arguing the processes not the result. "Imaging" itself is broadly generic enough to include all forms of image making. Like taxonomy, we are attempting to pigeonhole a continuum, and you can't. Well, you can, but you won't ever get agreement on how the boxes should be set up. Rearranging the boxes is what artists do... Trying to take "photography" out of "digital imaging", means you've reduced the definition of photography to "using light more than once", something that so far, has not been included in any "definition" of photography. The act of picking up a camera and recording photons, leading ultimately to a visible image, is the essence of photography. Everything in between is physics.
This discussion ALWAYS comes down to semantic arguments, because there is no universally accepted set of pigeonholed definitions for the "photography" continuum. The real question is "how does one solve the problem of reproductive isolation?".
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