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To me the artistry in photography is lost in digital. I mean my 12 year old grandson can take and produce great images from a lousy shot from a digital point and shoot. All he does is go into PSP and he can fix most anything and that makes me feel like you dont have to be a good photographer just good at photo editing. I have a Kodak point and shoot and if I take a bad shot I just think thats ok my grandson can fix it and he does but with film I feel you have to learn the basics and expand from there to get great shots and not rely on a computer program to make your shot great. Im 56 years old and Im going back to school to learn all about photo editing, Its not that I want to its because I feel that digital is the future and I want to stay in to photography even though I feel digital isnt any where close to what you had to be when you shot film.
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You can argue that this process (photography getting simpler) has been going on for at least the last 100 years. When was the last time you used a pinhole camera and flash powder ? I bet it took a lot of "artistry" to determine the right amount of flashpowered and where to position it to get a good exposure.
It is true that we have way, way more latitude to correct things now. So what was photography before we had this latitude ? There was way more emphasis on exposure, due to the primitive cameras we had. Don't believe me ? Go look at the controls on the ME Super I started with.
With the way things are now, a lot more emphasis is put on composition and color and processing, which I think is a lot more artistic than getting the exposure correct.
And one other thing... before we go talking about how much post processing can be done to save a digital shot, lets not forget the most or all of the film or film processing done for us at the film labs incorporated "efforts" to make sure the customer was happy with the end result. I am speaking of using film with wide exposure latitudes, auto exposure compensation during development, etc. So just because the 12 year old boy can fix a botched digital shot doesn't mean that someone wasn't fixing them for us before as well.
I got a bit of an eye opener when I first got my D50. With the 35mm EOS, properly exposed images with kind of a given. Sure I had some with poorly lit faces, etc, but generally they turned out pretty good exposure wise. That wasn't the case with the D50. Only after using it for a while did I get used to its exposure sensitivity and pay more attention to where I was metering and what I was doing. If you ask me, the D50 took more skill to get a great image than did the EOS.
Anyway... most of this is irrelevant. Digital imaging is here and its here to stay. I/we can wax poetic all day long about the good(bad?) ole film days, meanwhile people are snapping digital images like crazy. Its time I do the same.