Reply To: "Real" photographers are dumb

[cameraclicker]

Peoples lives are not (in most cases) in any way in danger by the work of a photographer or a gardener.

Usually it is photographer that dies, though fauxtographers shown here are not apt to find themselves in the usual places where that happens.  However, recently a bride died.  I don’t know how good the photographer was generally, or who’s fault it was, but someone demonstrated very poor judgment regarding water safety and “Trash the Dress” became fatal.

Also using pictures of your family to make them look ”beautiful”, boost your ego or justify your status in society is not very interesting to me. Maybe it is to you.

We all have our unique quirks.  We have no pictures on our walls and only four displayed in stands on shelves, a drawing my father did, a drawing a niece did, a picture of the two of us at Alaska and a group shot of family taken on our wedding day, by a friend because my brother was assigned the job of photographer for that day and he is in the picture.  No, my brother was/is not a professional photographer but he had an SLR and more competence than the fauxtographers featured here so we appointed him and handed him several rolls of film.  We have boxes of slides and boxes of prints and thanks to digital, hundreds of thousands of photos that live on multi-terabyte drives with selected ones printed and stored in binders.  Thanks to my wife there are even some photos of me!  The computer is usually on and screen saver cycles aimlessly through a selection of several hundred photos, mostly taken while travelling.

In the final analysis, I don’t care what you or any person spends their personal money on, or what you or they put on a wall.  But the processor in most digital cameras can take a decent picture when left to its own devices.  It makes me sad to see wedding photos on here that are less than you could get if you just put a camera on a tripod, selected the green square and self timer then ran to join the group, and sadder still to think someone actually paid to have that photo taken.

Most people equate professional with quality and think of amateur as being inferior.  As I have said in other posts here and elsewhere, professional is about collecting money while amateur is doing it just for the love of it, and there is no link to quality in either word — except perhaps that if you are not good you will not be collecting money for long unless you can continually find the “sucker born every minute”.   However, if you called yourself a professional, I thought people would expect you to have at least the minimum skills and equipment required to perform the job, and to provide a product of generally acceptable quality.  What this site seems to highlight over and over is that fauxtographers can put up portfolios of what many of us consider to be sub-standard photography and yet still attract customers.  I am not irritated by it.  I am saddened and amazed by it.