Ah, I love how incredibly stupid and careless the Buffy “remaster” was made. Let me talk about that in two pictures:

Hell, why not show parts of the set, including the crew. Color grading was completely skipped for some scenes, which derails the whole narrative, as they’re now seemingly taking place during day, for example. It’s amazing.

Unless you follow the advice of cooking the sauce for a couple of hours, after which all that will be left of the veggies will be basically fiber.

To be fair, when cooking a sauce (or stew, soup etc.), some of the nutrients will enter the sauce (vs. cooking water that will later be thrown away), but preserving nutrients / vitamins etc. while cooking still means reducing heat / cooking time.

Please don’t cook vegetables to oblivion and assume this will fulfill your kids nutritional needs. Not talking about you in particular, just making sure here.

I think eventually, you’re saying the same thing. If you want to shoot professionally, it makes sense to get equipment to save time and have a manner of control over reproducibility. That’s also why the local metal shop gets the $200 carbide endmills vs. grinding HSS blanks by hand. I did state that already.

I’ll still disagree with two things. You absolutely did say “art is expensive”, and stock photography will not produce a lot of art. It can be shot artfully, sure, but that’s more of a word choice and eventually rather equates to craftsmanship. I’m sure there is at least one stock photographer out there, producing art all the time. Same with any amazing shot that happens to get uploaded to a stock library not becoming any less meaningful. But that’s not common and simply not how the process works, claiming anything else would be disingenuous. I’m not out to disparage the craft or the skill of anyone involved, that’s a completely different topic.

Finally, I was actually absolutely thinking of the Contax 1. Now, don’t adjust for inflation. Why would you do that? This camera auctions for around $200, $250 today. Did something happen in the past 86 years that now makes it impossible to shoot the same, great pictures with that camera? I don’t think so. Yes, shooting has become a lot more convenient, a lot more consistent (some people would argue that’s a bad thing), but surely it’s not the tool then that enabled these photographs. That was my angle.

(Please let’s not get hung up on the particular camera model, availability of film etc., it’s an example to make a point)

It’s absolutely not. You can take perfectly fine, artsy photographs with a bunch of cheap gels and Chinese import lights.

You’ll be shocked to learn that people took fantastic pictures before an $8.6k M.ZUIKO lens came into existence.

Go ahead and tell me what a setup the likes of what Evans or Miller had at the time would cost today and stop putting art behind a paywall. Stock photography and repeatable product pictures are expensive, but that’s not art.

Professional photographers have expensive equipment because it makes certain shots commercially feasible, not because it’s impossible to create art without money.