Does driving a car mean creating a car? No. Similarly operating a camera is NOT photography.
Photography is the work of creating an image by recording light with the help of a camera. That’s what the word photograph means. It’s a combination of photo and graph. Photo mean light as in photosynthesis — the process used by plants and trees to make their food. They use photo or sunlight or light in this process, aren’t they?
So it’s clear that photography is not about operating a camera. Camera is only an instrument to record light, that is photo. Let’s say after 100 years in future a new instrument replaces today’s so-called camera. Will photography cease to exist. Obviously not. It will continue. You will then use the new instrument to record light.
What do you say? Why would somebody have invented a camera? How would artists create images when a camera did not exist? One way among others was to apply paint on canvas using brushes. What did they paint? They painted whatsoever interested them. Say a painter came across some scene and liked it very much. He used his tools to create an image of the scene. Shouldn’t the image look like the scene? How would the image look as the scene? They scene may have various elements in it plus the light. There may be places in the scene where there is no light. This absence of light is called shadow. In order to create a believable image, the painter has to show the elements of the scene, the presence of light and the absence of light.
Creating images by the way of painting is very laborious and time-consuming. These may be the reasons, which caused the invention of a camera.
So photography is like painting where you capture a scene. The difference lies only in the tools. The purpose of both crafts is the same — creating believable images. That’s is photography is called an art.
Summary
What is Photography
Creating a photograph is photography.
What is a photograph?
A graph made of photo is a photograph.
What is photo?
Photo means light. Like that in photosynthesis.
You mean a photograph is a graph of light?
Yes.
