This great little piece landed in my Inbox today from my school mate in Canada. This could be a tribute to all us great or not so great Photographers. Read on folks. You will love it or ........ hate it. The choice is yours. But do share some feedback - either way. Regards. Bipin.
1. It is more about equipment than we'd like to admit and smart kids. The kid whose dad bought him a D3 and a 400mm f/2.8 lens is going to have a better sports portfolio than you. You're talented but too fucking cheap to provide or get top notch equipment. As a consequence, he got all the primary shots he needed in the first five plays and spent the next half-hour experimenting with cool angle shots and different techniques, while you were still trying to get your fucking cheap DSLR to lock focus quickly enough and shoot. True, you can't pick up a pro camera, set it to P mode and instantly turn into Ansel Adams. But if you're learning at the same pace as everyone else and you are trying to keep up because your equipment can't hack it, the difference will be stark, and frustrating. Remember today’s kids are smart learners. 2. People are doing some unethical shit with RAW and nobody really understands or cares. Photoshopping the hell out of photos is a no no in photojournalism, we all know this. And yet I see portfolios and award compilations come to our desk with heavy artificial vignetting, damn-near HDR exposure masking and contrasts with blacks so deep you could hide a body inside them. When I question anybody about this they say "oh yeah, well I didn't do anything in CS6, just the raw editor in Lightroom real quick so it's okay, it's not destructive editing, the original is still there." It's not okay. But it doesn't seem like anybody cares. Some of the shit on the wire services looks exactly the same so they got jobs somewhere. That dude that got canned from The Blade for photoshopping basketballs where there were none? He's found redemption- I remember reading an article where some editor says "oh he sends us the raw files so we know its kosher now." Fucking storm chasers are the worst offenders at this shit. Guess what he does now. 3. Many times, sadly, it doesn't even matter if your photos are all that good or not. We are in the age of the Facebook Wedding Album. I've shot weddings pretty much every Saturday for a decade and if there is one thing I've learned it is the bride paradox: people hate photos of themselves even if they are good, people love photos of themselves with people they love even if they are bad. And that's totally fine. Now that many people have a DSLR, there exists an entirely new and growing population of couples who are perfectly happy employing their wedding guests as proxy paparazzi for everything from prep to ceremony to formals to cake to dance. They will like their photos better than ours, even though they won't last, they won't be able to put together a quality album, but they really don't mind. And nobody cares. My buddy, an excellent photographer that chooses to shoot mediocre but proven poses for senior portraits, yearbooks, weddings, school sports, etc.,.. makes something like $ 70k / year in Midwest money. He's a really great photographer, but you'll never see the good stuff he shoots because it doesn't sell. You shoot what the clients want. 4. Photography is easier than we'd like to admit. Here's something for you: I've been doing this for a long time. I am an excellent photographer. Give me an assignment and tell me what you want and I assure you, I'll come pretty fucking close to the picture you had inside your head. I am very, very good at what I do. You know what? You could learn everything I know in a few months. Maybe less if you really focus on it. That's it. My knowledge, my experiences, all of it, from professional sports to weddings to news to features to product shots to portraits, you can learn all in a few goddamn months, especially if you have Pro gear. 5. We need to stop being goddamn snobs and accept the coming of The Golden Age Remember that asshole kid with the $ 5k Nikon D3 whose portfolio was better than ours? Have you played with a D3? That is a sweet goddamn camera. That can do everything you need to do, right now. Even ISO 6400 is beautiful. And a lot of cameras are like that. Take the Pentax K-5 – beats the hell out of the Canon 5D Mk III, if we are to believe DxO Mark Everything is getting better. Sony, Canon, Nikon, Pentax, everything is fantastic. And that means more people are going to be able to afford really great cameras that can do amazing things and we are going to see some amazing photography come from surprising places. It's going to be awesome. It may also be the death of a profession – of Pro Photographers? Is this a bad thing for the industry? Look at the quality of the photos from a smartphone and the level of editing you can apply to those shots on the phone itself. No, this is a damn fucking positive thing. Cheers Photography and all you great Photographers! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
