how many are doing the sort of things that occupy much of this thread when they are out and about? Most I know spend most of that time "just doing" and my own conversations when out at a session rarely have anything to do with folk at all.

Bill Jay's book Cyanide and Spirits is an entertaining history of early photography in its social context. He says that when he started researching it, he assumed that the big issue for photography would be the analogous question, "is it art?".

What he found on reading cratefuls of publications written by photographers for photographers was that they didn't care about that at all, and the issue they were really heated about was "is spirit photography real?".