Is that all there is to it?

Photography is not an "art". It's half-science and half-art.

Photography is the great bitch of physics. Specifically, the physics of light at the visible spectrum.

More horseshit has been spewed on the subject of photography by people that don't understand basic physics than by all the horses in the world.

We are going to "inaugurate" this blog by walking through the basics. If you are a science-y type, you will enjoy it like a pig in (horse) shit. The rest will be mystified. No apologies will be tendered.

Photography is about capturing photons, and having the human mind make intelligible sense of the photons.

There. I've said it. That's all there is to it.

There are exactly two things here:

[1] recording the photons, and
[2] what the human mind does with the recorded photons.

Capturing the photons would be the science part. What the human mind interprets them to be (are they interesting? emotionally engaging? pleasing? annoying?, etc.) would be the art part.

These are solidly separate concerns, and since the blogger is the analytic type, we are going to engage both sides analytically (DUH!)

If you're not the science-y type, buckle your seatbelts. It's gonna be a (very) rough ride.