[clarionite]

I can understand what you're saying, but I don't know if I agree with it. Photographers study lighting... At one point someone came up with a new setup with lighting and others saw it and liked it and mimicked it. I don't think I want to recreate every detail of a portrait and consider it an original work of my creativity. But I would like to look at a portrait and say I like this or that from it and try to recreate the style. Sometimes that takes trying to recreate the entire thing for practice.

Having said that, there's an old saying... There's nothing new under the sun. With as many photographers as there are out there now, I'm not under the impression that anything I do is unique and hasn't been tried before. I do think however that everything I do has my own personal interpretation built in.