I understand what dlh is saying, but I have to agree with BobL. If you were shooting with film, you could control your image's appearance not only with lens choice, aperture, and shutter speed, but also with the film itself and how much you under- or over-expose it. And lighting, too, if you weren't relying on ambient light. And development: the choice of developer, temperature, time the film spends in it, how much agitation you use. . . . And the printing process, too--paper type, chemicals, time. . . . Those choices are analogous to those in so many other visual art forms. Even the choice to use a film, development, and printing that produces an image that appears "natural" is an artistic choice requiring knowledge, experience, and skill. In other words, it's an artistic choice.
That said, there are a number of images in this batch that I don't care for. I think there are times each of us sees an image and thinks, "If I were making that image, I would have . . ."--cropped it differently, used a wider aperture for more bokeh, shifted the plane of focus a bit, used more contrast in post, used less contrast, made the image cooler (or warmer), used cross-processing effects . . . the list goes on and on. So I can understand why dlh may not like some of the images.
Sometimes images strike me as cliches, and that keeps me from appreciating them as much as another viewer would. It's the same in other art, too: so many songs have lyrics with cliched imagery, whatever. Movies, too. Art, too.
My son plays Magic: the Gathering, a game in which there are close to 20,000 cards available from over 25 years of the game. So much of the artwork on the cards looks similar to me, partly because at some point, the art directors decided to go with a more unified look. But my favorite artist is Drew Tucker, whose impressionist works stand out from the vast majority of the other art. (I also like Rebecca Guay's art, and that of Quinten Hoover, though their art is very different than Tucker's.) My son doesn't like Tucker's art that much, preferring more detail in the artwork on an MTG card, and most of the Magic players today don't appreciate Tucker's art as much as I do, either. That doesn't make it worse than the other art, any more than my liking it makes it any better. It's a matter of taste.
On the other hand, I don't think it's all a matter of taste. Some artists, whatever the medium, have more skill or more talent than others, and it shows. That's true for photography as well as poetry and songwriting and painting and . . . well, everything. Heck, it's true for math, science, and engineering, too. And then there's the matter of artistic vision, too.
As far as lighting in a theatre production goes, I like the way my wife (who's also a playwright herself) watches plays. She wants to take it all in, experience the moment as it happens (and every performance is different to some degree, even of the same play by the same company on successive nights), enjoy it for what it is, and only later--say, after a week has passed--discuss the play with me or others. True, if you watch a play for the first time and are paying attention to the lighting rather than the play itself, it says something about you as a play-goer or the performance itself--and the latter could be attributable to acting, direction, set design, lighting, or oh so many other variables. But if you want to discuss a particular performance of a play intelligently and in detail, lighting is definitely on the table: it's as important in a production as it is in a photograph.
I've probably been too verbose on this topic. But I do think that skill in traditional and digital photography can be used to produce a wide range of images, and so much of that has to do with artistic vision. With traditional photography, that vision begins to assert itself in the choice of subject matter and film: Ektachrome, Sensia, Velvia, Kodachrome, Agfachrome, Ecktachrome Tungsten--each has its own characteristics, and the photographer chooses to utilize those characteristics based on subject matter, lighting, and the results desired. Negatives introduce even more choices. The methods to execute one's choices in the digital world are different, but the end results still highlight the photographer's vision (if the photographer feels he or she has succeeded, at any rate). We each respond differently for a myriad of reasons, but that doesn't make the artistic vision any less valid.
