manjamanga

You don't need a gray card if you don't care about color accuracy. And you don't need to care about color accuracy... unless you're doing something like product photography.

Then you really need a gray card and a calibrated display.

Of course it is. Nobody other than watch enthusiasts ever heard the name Blancpain before.

It's fungus.

And its "lens".

Twice I was gifted smart watches and twice they got forgotten in a drawer after one week.

I don't want to charge a watch every day. I don't want a watch that glows. I don't like the way they look. Outside sports, they don't offer me any useful functionality.

It really has nothing to do with wearing analog watches. I'd rather wear nothing than wearing a smart watch.

Low light is hard on autofocus. If your camera has trouble handling autofocus in low light, the best you can do is practice manual focusing on those situations.

You just asked one of the hardest questions to answer in photography. Finding and establishing an identity and personal style is a life long pursuit that is never truly complete.

Honestly, don't get too bogged down on it. A personal style is something that emerges with experience. The most important thing is do your own thing and be original. Which is infinitely easier said than done.

The level of profissional photographers that can be found on this sub never ceases to amaze me.

Last week some guy was shocked that his client was complaining they couldn't print his photos to any meaningful size. Turns out he was delivering 2MP images.

Today we have an entire photo shoot out of focus because the lens has a focusing ring.

Up next, how some poor sods lost their wedding photos because of a meddling lens cap.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here.

Let me clarify that I'm not mad at the existence of generative AI. It's fascinating and a lot of fun and I encourage everyone to play around with it. I would never publish the result of a MidJourney prompt as "my" work, but that's my own personal choice.
But I'm not even denying there are forms of creating genuinely original and meritorious art with recourse to AI tech. That's all well and good.

Random people posting on Flickr don't matter

I agree that the individuals doing that don't matter. They're frauds, but ultimately irrelevant.
But platforms like Flickr do matter, or at least I would like for them to matter - if nothing else, as communities where artists can share their work and appreciate the work of others. It's just a nice feature of the internet to be able to have this kind of communities.

But they have absolutely no mechanism to identify these AI works. I worry because it profoundly degrades the usability and usefulness of those platforms. If I need to comb through thousands of fake photos, Flickr becomes unusable.

I would argue we need more AI, developed with the purpose of identifying the products of AI for us. So that we can look at an image online and know if it was made that way.

Of course this is important, not only for online art communities, but even more to prevent the onslaught of serious problems that fake photos and videos will certainly bring in the near future.

There are... a lot of them.

In no particular order... Paul Strand, Ralph Gibson, Diane Arbus, Sebastião Salgado, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Marvin Newman, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Eduardo Gageiro, William Klein, Richard Avedon, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Anton Corbijn, Fan Ho, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michael Kenna...

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Look those up and others will come up.

Of course. Don't think of composition rules as rules at all. I should have mentioned that.
These are just the formal elements of art and should be studied, but when it comes to practice, they should only be sensibly applied at the discretion of the artist. Not taken as a prescription for what "correct" art ought to be.

I'm very familiar with Maier, Sutkus and countless other great photographers.

This is different. I've always enjoyed browsing through the work of anonymous photographers, you can find extremely talented people with super interesting work. Flickr used to be great for that.

But this makes that a lot harder. You have to be constantly on watch for this kind of fakery.

Start by understanding the formal elements of art. Use those to analyze composition.

Then go beyond that and try to understand what makes each photo elicit the emotionally reactions they do.

With Leiter, colors are a huge component. Look up color theory if you need to have better tools to analyze that.

Lighting is also important to understand, to get a better technical understanding of how the results were achieved.

All of it will influence your work one way or another. But make sure you don't get in too deep with only one artist. Try to diversify the art you're exposed to, in order to diversify your influences.