XtremeCamera

Over the course of the past few years there have been an awful lot of supposed photographers becoming more and more lazy about how they achieve certain results in the images they create. The huge paradigm shift to digital, as in digital cameras, computers, and software, has allowed many shooters to ignore all sorts of conditions, be they weather, location, available models, and everything else because “it can be fixed in Photoshop”. Whenever I hear someone say that I die a little on the inside.

Digital cameras, computers, and imaging software has made many people lazy and given poorly skilled and talentless photographers the ability to pass off their substandard work because the original snap of the shutter is simply the first step in a long line of steps before you see the final product. As bad as that is, it gets worse.

If you pay a visit to esquire.com this month (home to Esquire magazine on the internet) you can get a glimpse of the future of photography by viewing the video of Esquire’s “Sexist Woman Alive” for 2009, (Kate Beckinsale, the perfect choice by the way) and then viewing the photo gallery. Look carefully at both and you’ll notice that the so-called photos are nothing more than video grabs, hi-def, beautifully saturated, ultra sharp, video grabs from a RED ONE HD video camera. Just aim the camera and capture several minutes of video, load the digital film into the computer and then seek out the frames that can be lifted out as shown as photographs. Shoot enough video and you can’t help but get some great shots. Technology is killing talent, creativity, and hard work. So what’s the point? Where is the “decisive moment” when you get the freedom to look for it over and over in hi-def video?

Special Effects With Software Or Lenses

When it comes to special effects in photographs there are two ways to get them, through software or by creative use of your camera and lens. While I will readily admit to being guilty of using Photoshop to achieve the look I want for a certain image, applying a sepia filter, soft-focus, and even color filters, but so far I’ve shied away from attempting to change the photograph in ways where it can be done a bit more honestly with the creative use of lenses. That said, regardless of how you achieve the effect you want is less important than knowing HOW to achieve it in the first place, and why you want to achieve it.

Let’s be honest, okay? Photography, as an art and a skill, as a medium through which we communicate, is in a state of flux right now. Yes the digital camera has wiped out the film camera and there are only a tiny fraction of photographers using film today. But even so, a battle is raging between those shooters that own nothing more than the ‘kit’ lens that came with their $500 dSLR and those that save their money to add a new, precious piece of glass to their camera system, a piece of glass that would set them back $1500 and more. I would like to think that most shooters will continue to at least “want” to add new lenses to their gear collection but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen. Camera makers don’t help matters much when they continue to supply more-than-adequate zoom lenses with the latest dSLR kits (it it doesn’t matter to amateurs if the lens speed is an atrocious f5.6 when the digital sensor does a nice clean job at ISO 3200, ya know?) , and this never-ending financial collapse isn’t helping matters either.

The Internet Photographer Has An Ego… So What Else Is New?

If, after this state of flux subsides and the dust settles on the side of those that do all their special effects and photo enhancing through software, photography will suffer even more. I believe photography is suffering already and the Internet is buried, neck deep, with poor photography being passed off as good photography. For many reasons, too many to list here, there are photographs and photographers being recognized as talented and even wonderful when the real truth is anything but… the ability to even know what makes a photograph good, bad, or mediocre is being lost on most people. Even photography magazine publishers have no clue why a camera can do what it can do, and that is surely a sign of the photographic apocalypse.

But seriously, what should we expect? I mean, look what has happened to the younger people in the past 20 years. Kids being given trophies in school for coming in LAST place, a trophy for just showing up for chrissakes. No one wins, no one loses, that’s too harsh. Everyone gets the same deal, talent doesn’t matter, fairness is everything. It’s this kind of bullshit that causes mediocre photographers to believe they are special and gifted, because their parents and their teachers told them so.

These people, these supposed photographers, than post their photos to one of the million photo sharing websites and then actively seek the attention of viewers, begging for feedback, but only feedback that supports their delusion that they are special and gifted. As a society we toss off platitudes as easily as we exhale carbon dioxide because they don’t really cost us anything, so why not?, and so we give someone 5 stars so as not to hurt to anyone’s feelings, or worse, because we honestly don’t know if the photograph is good or not. How many times have you seen a photograph that was highly rated and you, honestly now, had no clue as to why? The Contagion affect at work in the online photo community, me thinks.

But yeah, it’s a combination of things that are making our industry nearly incomprehensible. It’s probably impossible to change the inevitable outcome too, so all we can do is bitch about it and hope for the best, or just bitch about it and wait for the end.

We’re An Auto-Tune Society Now

Much like this new generation of lousy vocalists making lousy records under lousy conditions using the magic of Auto-Tune, lousy photographers making lousy photographs under lousy conditions using the magic of Adobe Photoshop and one of the “cool new plugins”. In both cases the public is being bombarded with sub-standard product and they are beginning to accept them, even embrace them.

In the music world Lady GaGa is all the rage despite her lack of a singing voice, and photographers like Jill Greenburg are all the rage in our world despite her lack of vision. I’ll admit that Greenburg’s hyper-realism ‘look’ can, at first glance, impress, but the amount of digital manipulation to achieve it does nothing to keep photography honest. Then again, Lady GaGa has a following as well.

In fact, there is a new kind of celebrity out there today; one made of ego and technique and void of talent and vision. That celebrity extends to the photography world as well and it is an amazing thing to behold. These ‘photographers’ are prevalent on the Internet in particular, where with the right placement of their images, with the right mix of misdirected promotion and dishonest dealings, they can establish a following within a certain community and the end result is someone who thinks he or she is much better than he or she truly is. It takes a single comment, or vote, or whatever, for a sudden wave of positive feedback to come flowing in.

And God help us if the day comes when a photography magazine chooses the people it will exhibit by the amount of “followers” certain photographers have on these social networking websites like Model Mayhem and DeviantArt, with complete disregard for the talent of the photographer or the value of the photographs, because, well, the publisher doesn’t have a clue about photography and so the number of ‘followers’ a photographer has gives that photographer his or her ‘worth’ . Oh, wait…

Sadly, because of who we have become, these toss-off comments, votes, and whatever’s are being lapped up by the photographer and all of sudden you have a shooter on an ego trip handing out bad advice to lesser wannabes, and it just keeps spiraling out of control. They are more “digital illustrators” than “photographers” in the digital world, and in a perfect one they would be so labeled.

Now, I’m not advocating the abandonment of digital manipulation. That’s not going to happen. And this “me” generation won’t change as long as the people in control, the politicians, suffer from the same syndrome. It’s too late to change many minds, and it’s impossible to change the entire world. It will change though, it always does, but it will take a generation or two before it does.

Flicker Of Hope?

One of the original core beliefs of XtremeCamera’s “Member Gallery” was to offer members an honest critique of work. We tried a dozen different scenarios in an attempt to get the formula right, from having the staff of professional photographers do the critiquing, to allowing the members to give them, to hiring people that taught photography at the college level to critique. Nothing worked and eventually we simply gave up.

Still, despite the dreadful results caused by dreadful people that were certainly believers in “everyone gets a trophy” mentality, there were certain people that welcomed the critics and were relieved to be involved in a community that didn’t kiss your ass with fake compliments and heavy handed voting. But, for every honest and talented photographers attempting to critique a photograph there was the person who would admit “I love handing out stars, it makes people happy” idiots that destroyed every attempt at trying to stop the backsliding of our industry. Like I said, we simply gave up, walked away, and let the apocalypse come.

The Only Thing We Can Do

When I sat down this morning my intention was to write a review for a great specialty lens called “Composer” by the company “Lensbaby”. This wonderful lens does some really wonderful things, and instead of giving the photographer the easy way out, like Photoshop plugins, using a specialty lens took some talent, commitment to the image, and an understanding of the fundamentals of photography. So I began to write and after a few hundred words I was so far off course that it went from being a review to an opinion piece on the current state of photography. That being the case, I cannot end this without coming to some conclusions , or rules, to make the situation a tiny bit better (maybe just in my head, but still…), so here they are…

If you profess to be a photographer, learn the fundamentals or stop professing. A photographer creates photographs, a snapper points and shoots. You cannot create a photographer without knowing the basics, you just can’t.

Don’t tell someone their photograph is great unless you really think it is. If you don’t know why it’s great then say so. Nothing wrong with admitting, “I don’t know art, but I know what I like and I like this.” Or “I have no idea if this is photographically correct or not, but I like it”. Don’t feed egos that deserve to starve.

Stop believing the hype; you’re not that good. None of us are. Your photographs look like crap on a computer screen and a browser, to think otherwise is to show your ignorance about what photography should be. Chances are people aren’t being honest anyway. Keep working on your skills and don’t ever think you know enough because you don’t.

Photography is art and skill, not hit and miss. If you don’t know why f8 works and f5.6 doesn’t, stop calling yourself a photographer. If you have no idea what a faster shutter speed will do to the scene you’re about to photograph, stop calling yourself a photographer.

I could go on but maybe you get the drift. Let me leave you with what I believe is the most important bit to take away from this piece;

Stop taking shortcuts. Knowing Photoshop does not make you a photographer, it makes you an illustrator. Know the difference.

And if you have an ego that makes you believe that you’re better than most of those photographers you see in those fine art photography magazines you probably need to come down off that pedestal, stop posting your work on Flickr, and do some self discovery.

And in the end, don’t be an ass.

John Manzione