there is though - processing done by the camera or sw, and then additional user intervention.
Mostly I am content with the baseline processing done by my camera. I rarely intervene
That’s because cameras are pretty good these days. You can still alter it wildly depending on the settings. It’s still making a lot of choices. I’d rather have option to make those my self.
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Now that certainly isn’t photography 
Voja Mitrovic was a master.
It’ll do me.
If we’re worried that the camera is manipulating reality then, good heavens, we should really be losing sleep over what the eye and brain are doing to it ! (The ear is just as bad.) They’ve evolved not to to give us an objective scientific view but one which will spot the predators and potential mates and the next meal.
Personally I’d be happy with a camera+processing that gave photos which reproduced the experience I had at the time I saw the actual object. With things like sunsets or the vivid colours of nature I can struggle even to achieve that. I leave capturing things which are beyond the reach of my eye (most of Paul’s pictures of birds, for example) to more capable people than me.
VB
I’m not worried a camera is manipulating reality. My point was what is reality? It’s a subjective experience and how we interpret things like white balance isn’t straight forward.
Of course. Or you can take a raw file that preserves as much information as it possibly can (which can often look worse) then process it after the fact to achieve that goal.
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With film these decisions were still made. Just differently. Do you trust a cameras auto exposure (if it had it) or did you learn the zone system. Need more dynamic range? Push-pull process. Etc etc.
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i still have the option, but i choose not to deploy it.
So your content to let the camera/software make all those decisions for you, lovely. But they are still being made and no more right. Do you use standard mode or vivid? What level of sharpness do you set? Is Canon’s standard mode right or is Nikon’s? (Sony’s is Rong, fact)
I’ll keep playing with all the sliders just like I do in the darkroom printing b&w 
It’s threads like this that make me glad I’m not a teacher. There are always those kids that need things explaining in three or four different ways, and you can tell from their glazed expressions that they still don’t actually understand.
The worst bit is when they can’t understand why their teacher can’t see things from their point of view.
VB
yes, i trust once my camera is set up it will on the whole process to my satisfaction.
I fully understand that either the processing is done in the camera or in software - i played in the darkroom for years, i taught the damned subject… i am just expressing my preference, and that it suits me.
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At its inception, photography saw itself as an art and equal to painting - whether the threatened painters felt the same is another matter. But as painting, it has been, is, and always will be about making an image. Rest assured, pretty well every great photographer of the past from Man Ray to Ansel Adams was about making an image, and would use lenses, filters and darkroom manipulation to get their image.
Personally I don’t find capturing reality to be at all high on the list of priorities. It is about getting a shot you can work with, one with possibilities. And the same criteria as a painting apply in selecting, prioritising and applying those possibilities - composition, colour, contrast, balance.
You might get a shot which has it all straight out of the camera, but it occurs only rarely.
I see it as being about capturing light, and making something arresting, beautiful or profound from that capture. Very occasionally I think I’ve got near managing to do this.
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Or even this, which is a composite image, made up of images taken from a single point…
It’s beautiful, imaginative, startling even. Photography is art foremost.
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Mike wasn’t making the point that it suits. Mike was Insinuating to do otherwise was somehow wrong or more manipulated. I was merely clarifying that the manipulation has to take place some where.
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I was actually making the point that, to me, photography is capturing the image as seen, as accurately as possible, warts and all.
To others, it seems it is more about creating something else from the image seen. I have no problem at all with that and it certainly isn’t wrong.
It just doesn’t chime with my take on photography.
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And my point is there is no accurate. The colour/white balance/contrast/exposure/saturation/sharpness all has to be chosen. By something or someone.
What I find interesting about this debate (?) is that it seems at least to me that a cadre of people who are big analogue aficionados (vinyl, valves) so readily embrace digital image capture and manipulation.
Is that down to the expense and hassle of film and dark room technology?