Ansel Adams quotes
I am not sure that I know with any certainty exactly what Ansel Adams meant when he spoke these words. If my interpretation is correct, then I certainly agree with him.
Any nitwit can press a button…
… one of the reasons, for example, that it is so easy to start a war.
The wonderful metering, stabilization, and auto-focusing features that are built into modern cameras and lenses can eliminate a lot of the calculations (dare we say, “thought” 
) that went into photography by earlier generations of photographers. Now, any nitwit with a cell phone (and there is no shortage of these) can “snap” a photo and share it with a telecommunications company, a government, and any private individuals that he or she chooses (or failed to set the social media “security” to exclude)! Even with a moderately priced compact digital camera, modern electronics allow the average untrained individual to take reasonably good snapshots of friends, family, and vacation scenes. (On the other hand, if the photographer does not shoot RAW images, he/she is allowing the camera to automatically make a whole host of potentially “wrong” decisions in creating an image. In photography, as well as high tech, automation allows incompetent people to make mistakes at much higher rates of speed! )
Most of the other arts – painting, sculpture, music, etc. – require a bit of aptitude and training, and even more thought, to produce even poor compositions.
It is the deceptive ease of pressing a button and the lack of training needed by the button presser, that CAN sometimes cause people to fail to appreciate good-to-great photography and the hours of work that go into it (especially AFTER the image is “captured” on the detector or film). Perhaps it is also the lack of thought needed to press the button that makes it so easy to prematurely press the button and create mediocre photographs without any thought! I have told fellow visitors to Yosemite Valley that “it is hard to take bad photos in Yosemite, but I can show you some!”
We live in an age of convergence. Films incorporate animations that are unnoticed by the untrained audience. Games and movies are converging. Painting and photography are also converging, with “digital painting” and “fine art photography.” Painters have made “prints” of their works for years. So have photographers. Both work with light and electrons.
The “visualization” of the final work desired by Ansel Adams, which led to such wonderful photographs, was perhaps also encouraged by the technology of the day – large format glass plates, arduous hikes with heavy wooden tripods, and hours in the darkroom. Such technology encouraged making each shot count. In contrast, the casual recreational photographer of today can press the button all day, wasting little more than electrons and the time of the viewer.
Most other artists need to be thinking of that final composition every step of the way to their masterpiece.
Photographers who seek mastery of their art do, too, as serious photographers already know.
Four more quotations by Adams are:
“Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.”
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
… and significantly:
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™
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