Just wanted to drop by and say that most of my images are butt ugly. I may have shared some of them. I am not uptight about it though. I have taken good ones as well but they are much less interesting to play raw with. 
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LOL! 
I disagree with this. Mood is a large part to do with lighting, and finding the right angle of light. Yes it can be enhanced in post, but it is far more impactful to enhance great light than bland light. There’s a big reason landscape photographers like operating at sunrise and sunset. And composition is almost entirely done in camera. All you can really do in post is crop and straighten - which comes at the cost of resolution - and doesn’t help you find a better angle. Not to mention the impact of focal length, f-stop, shutter, etc…
However to me, both are equally important. I see many talented photographers who’s work I don’t wish to look at again due to their processing. Likewise, I see photographers with excellent processing but bland subjects. The best of both worlds is fairly rare - and no doubt many of us would disagree with each other anyway, due to style and taste differences. My favourite images tend to be shot on autochrome, which is kind of at the other end of the spectrum to the high contrast black and white of Matt Black, or the sharp clean colour accurate saturation you see in a lot of digital. Additionally, most portraits you see shot on that medium were taken in nature or at the least older style architecture, with older fashion, which again, is much more to my taste than grey modern cities and modern fashion. So I see subject and style as equally important, but what we each look for in those areas is no doubt different.
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You may have great light, a perfectly exposed negative, or an unclipped ETTR raw file, but without post that is at least decent, you still don’t have a solid photograph.
The negative is the score, but the print is the performance.
Photography is often stuck in an imitation of painting, at least for the composition and lighting parts, while at the same time, being subjected to a hate campaign directed toward post-processing and alterations. That sounds paradoxical to me. You realize that painting is 100% post-processing ? It’s very fake.
I don’t like lyrical definitions of art. First of all, I suspect the little art education most people have is only masterpieces from schoolbooks, so in their heads, art == masterpieces. Visit any small town museum, you will quickly get a sense that it’s only a survivor bias : most art is shit. It’s still art though. Bad people are still people. Bad art is still art. Art is the nature of the thing, not its property or quality.
Art is whenever a medium meets someone’s intent to produce a result conveying that intent. The medium and the tooling to achieve that is irrelevant. Art and sex are the last things we can do only for the sake of doing it. Everything else needs an external motive, a good reason, sometimes even an excuse.
We can redo pictures in post. In fact, whole movies are done in-computer, so why not photographs ? Who cares what should be done in post and what should be done on stage ? Whatever works… With physically-accurate algos, the light on the scene is equal to the light in the computer, whatever you couldn’t do on stage can be simulated in post. Have you seen videogames lately ? They simulate whole worlds real-time with almost photo-realistic perfection. Plus they have better color management than any photo editing software commercially available.
When doing analog, most of the final rendition (contrast and colors) is imposed by the film + paper combination. You may control the content, but hardly the look. Color film imposes its color signature on you, that is, film manufacturers decide what is beautiful for you. With digital, you get/have to build you very own film emulsion yourself. What an improvement ! You now have full control over the expressive palette. See how movies use color grading to setup a mood ?
Yet photographers are still trapped in endless discussions on what is true photography, or - if I may translate - what sorts of difficulties we may invent ourselves to keep it a difficult thus noble art in a time where everything seems so simple that it may have lost any value.
Well, value is in ideas and results. Use paint, pencils, clay, 3D software, virtual darkroom, whatever, but be aware that it will most likely end up as a matrix of pixels somewhere over the web, so why not take advantage of that in the first place ?
Film is only a look.
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Hear, hear!
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In my opinion in the near future the only art in photography will be in positioning the camera and taking the image: capturing the right moment with the right angle in the right composition.
All the rest will be taken care of by some AI/ML editing software with only user input being the actual image data.
Even if your prediction comes true you still have to pick ai and set some parameters.
Arguably film was equivalent to ai. You had a fixed set of looks that you could print and manipulate with some variation. I don’t think this limitation was particularly bothersome.
In my opinion photography has always been about
All else is at best secondary. You can make a bad image less bad or a great image more great by pp but you cant really go from bad to great. (There are of course very niche exceptions) If you break the bounds of photography you can of course make good art from “bad” photos.
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But why stop there? I could strap a camera to my chest, taking 30 shots every second, and AI could then select the best shots of thousands, according to some preset criteria: like Cartier-Bresson or Rembrandt or whatever.
Ai will destroy photography is the new “photography will destroy painting” 
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It did, more or less. At any rate, it freed painting from the obligation to “make things look real”.
I did notice "obligation ". I’ve not heard anyone looking back suggest that photography caused a decline in painting. I’ve heard many arguments that painting and sculpture declined but those point to other changes in society.
Richters “Betty” 1988 above
Richter did many photo paintings where he painted from a photo. They are quite extraordinary. Something happens when quirks of photography are executed by paint and combined with inevitable editing and in richters case sometimes blurring.
One from 2017 to emphasize your “obligation” point.
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hopefully this is correct as far as both forms being distinct from one another and both forms continuing is concerned.
and so AI will do the same for photography, if PhotoShop hasn’t already.
Google already made this product. It was a camera you set in the room of your house and it would upload what it thought was significant to your google photos.
AI will do the same for a certain kind of photography, the one that serves as a commodity and immediate-reward toy.
Composers can feed MIDI scores to synthesizers, then get their pieces played by machines. Yet musicians still sell CDs and concerts tickets.
Photography is a broad spectrum of practices, intents and expectations. 20 years after digital, some guys still do wet plates and platinotypes. Yes, these are not your average event photographer.
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To paraphrase:
‘Past success/performance is not necessarily a good indicator of future performance/success.’
Machine Learning has some potential but it is NOT intelligence by any means. It is trained to do what others have done. It’s not going to come up with the next big thing that nobody has done before. It’s going to excel, if trained properly and only then, at the stuff that’s been done over and over and over again.
sky replacement, now with AI
yeah, okay, good for you! 
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certainly, see my preceding response in the same post - I don’t think AI will consume all that is photography.
to go back to this for a second:
in this sense then is the key to creating the most valuable art not in choosing the correct medium for an idea?
photography is interesting in that you’re using a device to capture moments from reality in time, and while we understand all the flaws in these devices ability to do this authentically, they can still be used to create this illusory sense of connection to a reality in a way that’s quite unique from other mediums like paint and sculpture.
so while photography cannot produce art equal to that which is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for example, perhaps in embracing its limitations we can create art that is of equivalent value.
we all know Ansel Adams is famous for his work in the darkroom, and such manipulations are essential in mitigating the flaws in our capture devices and to try and convey the feeling we had in the presence of what would become the image.
that is the beauty of photography, the beauty of the natural world, that someone stood in front of this grand cloud formation and was able to capture it.
if photography were to be liberated from this it would lose its very essence, its value, and its relevance. So while AI might gain much attention from the cult of the new, and will no doubt be a revelation for advertisers, I can’t see it being taken too seriously in the long-term, thankfully.
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I’m really not sure.
You can get your heart racing from reading a novel. You don’t see anything, you just imagine.
You can get your heart racing from watching an anime cartoon. You see something, but those comics figures, drawn with flat shapes, are nothing close to reality. And yet you connect with them through the story.
You can get your heart racing from watching old movies with bad CGI. At first, all you will notice are the bad CGI, but after 10 min into the story, it won’t matter anymore. Because, again, you will be taken by the story.
And, of course, you can get your heart racing from full HD, crystal clear, modern movie.
To be clear, when I say heart racing, I mean that adrenaline shot you get when the hero is in distress or suspense is burning. Because that kind of emotion is easy to measure through hormonal concentration. But it could be any other emotion, really.
So the resulting emotion has little to do with the chosen medium or/and the connection to reality. It has more to do with how it reaches your imagination and connect to your memories to bring you somewhere else.
Once again, let us not be fooled by the technics and material peculiarities.
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What even is the “most valuable” art? Or even “valuable” art?
I create things to share with other people, so they can have some notion of what I am thinking and feeling. There is value for me in my own creation. I hope there is value to someone else in my creation. But the notion of “most valuable” is strange, as I’ve always picture it as one-to-one. I’m sure there is some phenomena of many people experiencing the same thing at once and deriving some sense of pleasure from it, like the hundreds jammed into that room to see the Mona Lisa.
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I disagree, while I’m quite sure that if you chose to measure adrenaline for example to try and quantify and compare excitement levels when experiencing different stories in different mediums you could well measure similar levels, such an experiment would be quite pointless.
can you really compare the visceral response one might have to even anonymous characters being killed by an explosion in fractions of a second at the cinema to the pages of writing that would be necessary if you hoped to generate a similarly deep response in a book? Even if an equal chemical response was produced, the book will differentiate itself with much more narrative structure, the film by forcing the viewer to make more assumptions based on the imagery.
its just not possible for these experiences to be equivalent. The mind doesn’t work so simply, it has biases to different forms of stimuli. Both experiences can still be profound, certainly, but they are fundamentally different due to the nature of their mediums.
to evoke feelings is vital in art, but to also have meaning is what it really should aspire to, and this is where the differences in mediums becomes critical to the artists expression.
there’s really quite a difference between watercolours and oils, let alone painting and photography, literature and sculpture…
Andrei Tarkovsky said “the purpose of art is to prepare man for death”, perhaps he means art is about revelation - which needn’t be thought of in a Christian paradigm.
beyond that I think its plain to see that the statue of David is more valuable than my first foray into clay sculpting in high school. Why do people pile into see that like they do the Mona Lisa? Perhaps these great masters have captured something that most have great difficulty seeing, but it can be felt.
edit: underline this point, art is about communication.
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