I see the Profession of photography...

I see the Profession of photography slipping away with every breath that I take. Each week I hear of a new program or plug in that helps create your "digital masterpiece" with a touch of a different button. Now I'm not bashing these programs personally, I can even go as far as saying that I like some, but we must understand what this is doing to our integrity as experienced image makers. I can even see it starting now. People with hardly ANY experience and know-how have the wonderful choice of just sitting back in their home office and push a few buttons to fix their crappy pictures. Do they understand what happens when they press that button? No, they don't. All they care about is that their new $80 program just fixed their noise problem by "vanishing" it. Now if they spent some time understanding the nature of their camera instead of pretending to be playboy's next airbrush artist, they could learn that the noise is because they are not exposing properly(or they decided to get that wonderful point and shoot because the 8pixels "blew away" the low end SLR competition). Each one of these simplified programs brings our world of quality to a fatal end. This includes Nikons new attemts to control our RAW converter. The less choices we need to make, the more zombies will saturate our profession. We should make sure that to achieve professional quality we must make every choice needed to get there. This extends past our creative decision of f/stop, shutter speed, file type, and RAW converter. We need to make sure that if you want to create a professional print you must first understand the professional equipment, and that you respect it. We need to make sure that these professional tools are for the professionals only and not for the everyday consumer, or else every journalist, artist, etc. will be swearing allegiance to sony's cybershot for one simple reason: it's all they know how to use. To me, photography is not just a business proposition, but a way of life, and I intend on making sure that it is and will always be a respectable one.

Andrew – Sun, 2005/04/24 – 12:10am

Well roared, Lion. As a matter of fact, I fully agree with...

Well roared, Lion. As a matter of fact, I fully agree with your concern. Hopefully real quality will emerge in the long run.
Best regards, Henk

Henk Backer – Sun, 2005/04/24 – 2:24am