Originally posted by Kirivon That's like saying Formula 1 drivers only use paddle shifters because they can't drive manual transmissions.
Actually, that's not what I'm saying, but that's what the OP seems to assume - more on this later.
Originally posted by Kirivon Skill eventually reaches a plateau and is bound by the laws of physics; at some point one can not react or move any faster. Technology is simply a means of expanding human potential.
Yes, skill is limited by laws of physics, but so is technology. I'm not so sure about the human potential, but let's not open that can of worms here.
The fact is, sometimes people use technology not because they've reached a physical limit that they can't get over, but because they lack skills. As people start relying on technological crutches more and more, they find it harder and harder to believe that some things could be achieved without their current technology. And with new technology, skills of using older technology are also lost. This is fact.
This thread was started based on the assumption that to shoot sports you need a high frame rate and super autofocus. I say that those are not *necessary*, but they could improve your odds. Saying that you need those, to reuse your example, is like saying that Formula 1 racers need paddle shifting to drive a car. See the point now.
When guns where introduced to Japan, Japanese gunsmiths flourished for a while and guns played a big role in Nobunaga's victories. But after they did their job, they were prohibited, because they would enable a simple peasant to kill a skilled samurai from a distance. Read about it
here in section IV. It's a case where technology was adopted because it compensated for lack of sword skills, not because people had mastered sword skills to the point where they couldn't make more progress. And it's also an interesting example of reverting back to an earlier technology.
Originally posted by Kirivon To further the race car analogy, traction control and paddle shifting may make the cars easier to drive, but as a result they go much faster. Thus in the end skill is the same: being able to extract 100% from the technology at hand.
I'm not sure if they go faster - you probably meant they accelerate faster or can drive faster more safely. And yes, skills evolve. Like swordsmanship which gave way to shooting skills when guns were adopted. But this is a different point that doesn't contradict what I said earlier.
The question I was trying to ask is how much can technology change so that we can still call ourselves photographers. Because a swordsman that took up a gun, could no longer call himself a swordsman, but became a gunslinger/shooter. After how much progress, do we stop being photographers and we just become operators of some future technology?
Search for "plenoptic camera". Take that technology, combine it with a large sensor size, a large frame rate, great ISO capability, and lots of storage, put it on a car moving around cities (or put it around a stadium, since we started from sports photography), then have some guy just sit at a computer, sifting through the uploaded images, occasionally croping and refocusing an image - would that be called photography?