Silent night hours

Last night, whilst my partner went to see a dance performance, I decided to stay home. I happily pottered around the house, made a yummy roast and came up with a few important discoveries.
Well... not that any of this is new, but yesterday I discovered that time is the most important factor in photography. I know I know - we have known this for a while - but using a digital camera, in a sense, I forgot all about time. Not so much that I forgot it, but I let the camera think for me and while this worked when I used film, it does not necessarily work with a digital camera. A digital camera gives you what is in front of you and not colours as I see them, or wish them to be. With film I knew what I had to do, to achieve the imagined colours. In digital photography most of it is done in post-processing and hence my question - is it still photography? So while I can do the colours in photoshop, I prefer to create my images with the camera and not in photoshop. And this is where time came up.... it manipulates colour and changes the original, to something you dream up. Over the last few years I have learnt (and hopefully will continue to) so much from trying different films, pushing, cross processing and making a million mistakes. I always had enjoyed (still do) using vivid films, pushed to achieve altered colours, but it has taken me a while to understand how I can achieve this with digital. Well I still do not know how to achieve all of the imagined colours with my D camera, but I am slowly getting there.
Photogaphy is to invent colours with time - no photoshop used.