> > Gosh, I thought professional only meant, its your way
> > of earning an income, I didn't realise it is so complicated!
Seems to me we're starting to mix up a couple of things.
"A professional's camera" is a camera used by a professional.
It can be anything that _some_ pro finds useful. (And then
the question is "professional _what_?" I know a biologist
who uses a camera to document plant diseases as part of her
work. She is using a camera professionally, as a tool with
which she earns her living, but "photographer" is not her
profession. Some of her requirements, however, match those
of professional photographers.)
"A professional camera" has different nuances. It refers to
a camera people _expect_ a significant number of pros to find
useful. And on that basis, it really has at least two meanings:
A camera that one feels meets certain criteria
for "suitability for professional use" (subjective)
A camera that the manufacturer has designed (or has
designed a marketing plan for) to attempt to fit the
requirements of some segment of the professional
market (arbitrary)
Related to the second, we also have:
A camera that the manufacturer has decided to label
"pro" to increase its cachet (arbitrary)
So we have one subjective meaning, one arbitrary meaning, and
the closest we get to an objective standard is a closely
related (not the same) concept with _fuzzy_boundaries_.
Folks, we're _not_ going to nail this one down, and it's
because of _language_ reasons! First, we're not all even
talking about the same thing, and second, what we're talking
about is not objective.
Yes, we can try to pin down "suitability for professional use",
but we quickly get into "what kind of professional" (Polaroids
for passport photos, driver's licenses, event badges, etc., are
clearly _commercial_ cameras, some of which have far less use
outside of a commercial setting than any of the "pro" cameras
discussed so far -- do they count? What about the whole "wedding
versus photojournalist versus portrait versus fine-art versus
product photographer" thing? Different needs for different kinds
of professional photographer!). There are certain requirements
we might be able to agree on, such as "reliability" (but even
there we have the question, "How reliable (and by what measure)
does it have to be to count?"), but that alone doesn't seem to
fit most folks fuzzy notion of what it means to be a "professional
camera". For every requirement we nail down (and most of _those_
will have a "with some exceptions" caveat attached), there will
be several that are either completely subjective (what's a hard
requirement and what's merely a desirable feature?) or don't
apply to all types of professional photographer.
Oh, we can talk about this, especially if you're having fun
talking about it. Some of us may even get some useful insights
out of the discussion. But we're never going to finish talking
about it by figuring it all out and convincing each other that
we, as a group, now know what a "professional camera" is.
One thing I find rather telling is the fact that all the cameras
I've seen discussed so far have been ones that are equally suited
to hobbyist use. The "pro cameras" _we're_ interested in, whether
we're pros or not, seem to be the ones that hobbyists are also
interested in. Not the four-photos-on-one-sheet Polaroids, nor
the large-format-permanently-attached-to-a-copy-stand machines,
nor arial survailance cameras ... all of which are more obviously
*professional* cameras not because they meet arbitrary or subjective
criteria for what a professional camera _should_ be, but simply
because they have so little use outside of a professional setting!
_Those_ are obviously professional cameras as much because of what
they're _not_ (i.e. hobbyist cameras) as because of what they are.
(That is, they're not professional cameras because they're not
hobbyist cameras; rather, their being professional cameras is
_obvious_ because they're not hobbyist cameras.)
-- Glenn
-
This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe,
go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to
visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
