"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but it is the experience."
— Mark Rothko
I got a camera to photograph paintings so I can make prints (someday). I don't think of myself as a photographer, but I have really enjoyed going out and doing it. It's interesting to me as a beginner and thinking about some of the ways it is and isn't like painting.
There is something really interesting that happens sometimes when people describe paintings that they don't ever seem to do for photographs -- seeing a painting of the sea, someone might say they can taste the salt, or feel the wind. These are sensations that neither a painting or a photograph can make real, but for some reason people do seem to feel paintings in ways that are not only visual.
So an aspect of the magic of painting is that painters can capture more than what is there in an image. There's another kind of magic too, though, in what you can see of the process. There is a connection, per brush stroke, since each one says something of both the subject and the painter. John Berger sums it up pretty well:
"...the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter's immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one's own act of looking at it."
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
In contrast, the magic of photography, I think, is knowing that the moment you are seeing is a real moment. Experienced by you through the photographer. That's pretty cool too.
"Photorealistic" art did not exist before photographs. Photographs have in a very true sense defined what reality looks like to us now. Our eyes do not actually see the same as cameras do
Earlier in my life I admired effort, and painting seems like a lot more effort to produce an image than a photograph. But, besides being nonsense (a photograph can take a lot of effort and a painting very little, I have learned this!), that's a terrible criteria to try and judge anything by. Some of my best paintings flowed out of me with very little effort at all, and some I've worked and re-worked and I'm still not particularly happy with them.
There is no right way to make art, and it doesn't matter how much effort it is, or how many people like it, or if they think it's deep or not. It's just good to make it. It makes life brighter.