> In fact, I seem to recall that > I've read someplace around Luminous Landscape that Mike thinks of > anyone who earns money with their camera and lenses as professional, > and the rest he considers amateurs of various levels.
If I'm the Mike you're talking about (and you weren't talking about Michael Reichmann, who goes by "Michael"), I'm not sure I particularly care about the issue one way or the other. Pros know who they are, and there isn't much mistaking a real pro. Where I differ from most hobbyists is that I don't consider pros to be the best photographers. I admire their skills, business acumen, and problem-solving abilities, but generally I think that doing photography in return for money under the direction of someone else is not a very good way to make good pictures. Albert Watson, for instance, is tremendously skilled and makes a million dollars a year (actually that's probably considerably underestimated). But by his own admission he photographs mainly "blue jeans, sunglasses, and suits." His job is to make blue jeans, sunglasses and suits look cool, new, and visually exciting, and constantly find new ways to do so. Not an easy task, but then again the end result is just not something I particularly care about. Another famous pro once said that his challenge was to take a picture with a perfume bottle in it that would still be a wonderful picture if it didn't have the perfume bottle in it. But his tragedy, of course, is that he cannot take the perfume bottle out. Overall, I'm not very charitable to pros. Anyone who wishes to do so may write this off to envy, sour grapes, prejudice, whatever. But I like _art_. --Mike
