It is a little weird. I sometimes see images in fashion mags where you can literally see the make up on the faces of the models. They end up looking like people dressed in costumes, instead of a woman dressed in an evening gown etc. It's like a badly dressed movie set that ends up looking like a showroom, instead of a place where an actual person lives.
It's funny... I actually get that feeling in real, moving life when I see some people with too much makeup, or who are excessively dressed-up, or both. It's amazing how overdoing things can make them seem so tawdry, whether in a magazine, in a film, or on the street.
Yet I wonder if that's an aesthetic choice on my part, too. My comment before, about aesthetic expectation, really wasn't meant to be glib. We know that our eyes and brain perceive color and light in a very different way from films/sensors–we are much more adaptable at color balancing, for example. So to find any ideal color balance in a photograph, we're looking to reproduce a certain relationship of colors that we perceive as normal, or balanced. However, we run into an issue. Because we don't always expect photographs to look like the ideal color balance we see with our eyes, we tend to desire a specific 'look' in photographs, something that makes them 'photographs'. This, I see, is the film/digital issue. I think we are accustomed to looking at images and categorizing them into styles based on their color balance, general compositional approach, and a host of other factors. For how many years has this been done with only film? We are trained to expect that certain look, to the point of preference and comfortability with the image, which conveys "I am photograph–you may consume me as such."
I wasn't around, but some here may have been... what was the transition from B&W to color like? In journalism, in art, in magazines? Were there complaints of color being 'too close to reality'? Of being too 'everyday' to achieve the level of abstraction necessary to communicate the essence of things? I don't know the answers, but I have a hunch. And I think, from one side, it is the same with digital. Aesthetic preferences do change over time, and differ between cultures...
If we return to the issue of color vs. B&W, and here I'm only guessing, didn't it take the creation of new 'looks' by new photographers to change perceptions? With this idea of 'look', I return to Bill's initial point from his first post:
But i don't think I am particularly interested in a camera quality as much as an individual photographer quality.
I think these individual 'looks' or 'qualities' can later become associated with a particular technology (or style–different from 'look'), perhaps even be grouped together with that certain technology as an organizing principle, but without those individual 'looks', the technology (or style) would neither have made a name for itself nor have worked its way into our psyche. I still remember the first time I saw certain images, and years later those images still define something for me. Frankly, some are the reasons I started using rf's in the first place–I'm sure the same is true for many here. But humans can make art with ANYTHING, and by and by some are bound to make something good with each!