Peter,
To be clear.....I an NOT advocating HDR, especially in its presently overused or extreme fashion. I was talking more about how modern equipment can deliver very good DR in a natural way, but that gets compressed and saturated to extremes, thus defeating what was originally captured and delivered. This works for some interpretations, but I kinda like seeing the hints of details in the shadows and stuff at times.
I also agree with what Marc is saying that there has been a growing preponderance of style that borders on what we used to call gaudy at one point, but now seems to be used to grab attention for the client and the product they are selling. Again, I think that works well for some things, but it does tend to be overused. I was flipping through some high end commercial mags the other day and found myself bored page after page until I hit upon a few very simple, subtle, clean ads with little apparent overwork. I found them so much more interesting and attracting, but honestly, I was more into the image than even recalling the product being sold....LOL.
With respect to the changes or cycles that Marc mentions.....I agree. We have moved from the old static mannequin poses to a blur of active "poses" trying to represent more of an editorial capture for the tabloids. Nothing really wrong there either, but the spectacular seems to be lost in much of it. Not sure how much of that is the fault of the shooter or the shootees, but it tends to lack that "moment", or is trying to force one, rather than being more natural and letting the photog really work to capture things.
To me, everything seems so much more hurried. The attention span of the viewer is much shorter in many cases, so splash and dash rules over subtle. Maybe I am stuck in the older viewing world where it is more enjoyable studying a few good images than flipping through hundreds of mediocre or less images. Is it a quality v. quantity thing? I know that cannot be the case with single commercial ads, because there is only one shot that gets used, for the most part, but weddings and even portrait shooting has taken on the life of a thousand images over a few really nice ones. Just my opinion. (Granted, you may need to shoot a lot to get those few, but then again, shooting fewer and more deliberately could work quite well also.) Seems to be a couple of different parts to this tread, and I think that is good, as it encourages one to think about the different purposes for the images.
O.K., time for another cup of coffee to clear a few more cobwebs, and then maybe a trip to a few galleries to look at things again. (I used to spend one full weekend day at the Museum of Art in Chicago, every week when I was growing up, and then 2-3 trips a week to the various museums in Boston when in grad school, usually between classes, just to "study" what the painters had done so deliberately. Most photography today, or maybe I should say most processing today, has a similar deliberateness, but tends to miss the point or overall look at the expense of trying to grab attention.)
LJ