Hello Marc,
Well, we are trying to tone it down to normal, here, aren't we, and that takes care of that side of answering I hope, in one or two senses. And then I'd like to respond on another side of your question mostly by posing a query of my own which I have been harboring for a while for the right time. This had better be over on the TVS forum which I presume you also read, since it is about that camera even if it is also mentioned here.
But let me try a little if I can directly, at least as it seems to me this evening, out in a wooded Oregon of the US for the time being. Pictures indeed can speak volumes - but only if one has enough knowledge to interpret and develop on what they may personally say.
As far as I can see it, photography has always been an art as embedded as any in its technologies - not different in principle from locating and grinding your own Lapis Lazuli, then adding the oils and solvents and whitewashing the canvases, before picking up a brush, if you were Hans Holbein (possibly my eras are slightly out of step there, hope not).
It gets to be more so nowadays, as there are very apparently some complex interactions between lenses and sensors and processing that change the rules of several games. Film at least allowed us pretty much to separate - know something about lenses, something about mechanisms, and something about films - then develop tastes for different combinations we liked to make (and remember the discussions about these!). And, we could choose one at a time, develop the others independently.
In digital, it's an ensemble which we cannot so easily control that clearly counts. When you can have two cameras as similar even to sensor technology, and as different in results, as the TVS-D and the Canon S50, for my interested ex&le, there seem definitely relevant questions. One has to learn things, come to understand, which one can get the clarity and depth of blue you want, as if it were pigments - and how you can think to influence the result.
Very often that information can be found only between the points of view of several persons who are quite interested in the subject. It's a great challenge of these days, not just in photography, to learn how we can provide opportunities, and learn manners to speak, where this works best.
A Chinese woman, president of a company, who I worked with for a while in a venture in Europe, gave me a nice proverb on this topic, which really was much our actual business, about 'three shoeshine men being equal to one strategic genius' (a particular general's name, in the real language of the saying).
Here in this forum we are trying something like that story and it is fruitful. The one thing older cultures don't help us as much in, to say with appropriate understatement, is where we need to build a new kind of respect and appreciation, thus treatment, between younger and older practitioners. We all live and develop and contribute in stages which can only be reached from that development longer now. We clearly need the fruits of all stages, one more ecology in our real world.
I think it's worth our patience to look at the plants at their different moments, help the seeds grow, and branches train, knowing storms or seasons may come again, then with better accommodated effects, and anyway don't last.
Best and regards to you, Clive
