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>"Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure," Ms. Eismann said. "Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and ove
by roc 17y ago
>"Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure," Ms. Eismann said. "Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?"
An interesting re-occurrence of Steve Martin's observation in a recently posted article:
"[It] was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances."
- gaius 17y agoYes that's exactly it. Every photographer looks at a professional shot and says "I could have taken that". But what makes a great lansdcape photo (for example) is that some guy for 6 months woke up before dawn every day and humped his gear up the hill and picked the right moment to take the shot, then sorted through dozens of images to find the shot and that's what appears in the calendar. Sure you could have taken that shot if by sheer coincidence you happened to be on that hillside at just the right moment, with all your gear and your wits about you. But you weren't...
- wallflower 17y agoI attended a lecture once by Dewitt Jones, a National Geographic photographer. He says that people always ask him how many shots it takes to get that magazine-worthy shot. To which, he answered "Not shots. How many rolls" http://DewittJones.com http://DewittJones.com
- ilamont 17y agoWhile it's unlikely one amateur could have coincidentally matched the pro's efforts, a few thousand amateurs working independently could have come up with at least a few pro-quality shots -- and not demand professional wages to do it. Note also that not all pro work is concentrated around difficult shots or situations. Gabe Rivera of Techmeme tweeted a few weeks ago about Agence France-Presse flying a professional photographer out to the U.S. to shoot him as part of an interview package. The photo they used online? His hand holding a mouse: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jj324Ei1-ngJUBVLfVYLMjwofwFQ http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jj324Ei1-...
- gaius 17y agoOK, but a professional-quality photograph still costs money to produce, let's say a photo costs $1000. That might be the pro charging the magazine $1000 and delivering the image or it might be a thousand amateurs all "spending" $1 on their camera, their time, gas for the car, whatever and one of them giving it to the magazine for free (after we have also accounted for the photo editor sifting through a thousand submissions). I'm just not seeing where the net value-add is here.
- cookingrobot 17y agoA thousand people enjoy taking the picture - that's worth a lot. A hundred actually think they took a good one and post it. An editor browses flickr or whatever and quickly finds a good one and offers that person $50 or a photo credit, and makes their day. Everyone wins, except the professional photographer.
- gaius 17y agoI still can't help but feel that we're losing something. Where's the next Ansel Adams in this scenario? The thousand-amateurs argument is like the argument that the world doesn't need professional developers, any amateur can build their own apps with Excel and Access...
- cookingrobot 17y agoI think the world gets more great artists when the barriers to entry are lower, and there are more amateurs in the field. It might have been easier to name the great photographers of 50 years ago when there were fewer of them, but I think there are a lot of great photographers now - likely more than when it was a less accessible art to get into. Another angle is that there are certainly more "good" photographers now - I think this generations personal photo collections are way better on average than in the past, because so many people know good photographers, or can take lots of pictures and get lucky sometimes. That's really valuable on an individual level.
- ja27 17y agoYes but what happens when you have 10,000 amateurs taking sunrise landscape photos for every professional doing it? You still might not pick an amateur photo for a calendar, but you'd probably pick it for a background in an ad.
- kmak 17y agoThe best camera is the one you have with you.
- hopeless 17y agoCatching that moment is one of the reasons I'm building http://shutterscouts.com http://shutterscouts.com - an idea notebook and forecasting service for landscape photographers. A pro landscape photographer will plan their shoot: weather, sunrise/set, times, directions. And then they'll wait, try, fail, try, fail, kinda succeed... and then come away a completely different shot ;-) Apparently, it's 50% planned shot / 50% unplanned (but discovered during a planned/failed shot) I hope Shutter Scouts can make it easier for enthusiasts and professional alike to make the most of their time by pointing them in the right direction, at the right time, for their most promising ideas.
- pwk 17y agoPhotography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take so many photos; so what if 99.9% of them are awful, as long as there's a good filter to find the gems. This of course doesn't work if you absolutely must have photos of some particular event, so there will always be room for professionals even if they're squeezed.