Last night I had my SB-600 flash on a tripod while I was fiddling with my Nikon D90 making sure it would trigger the flash wirelessly. My best friend and his girlfriend were over when his girlfriend looked at my camera and said "My mom has that camera." I sadly wasn't surprised. These days it's not uncommon to buy a $1200 camera to use as a point-and-shoot.
Let me put it this way, I used to have a $150 dollar Sony Cybershot. I got some above average pictures from that out of the few hundred I probably took. After that I got a $800 Olympus E-410 (My first DSLR) and got a handful of stellar images, a few above average ones, and a few thousand mediocre ones. With my D90 I've been able to take pictures on par with my E-410 (A camera you can get used with kit lenses for roughly $350 now) while I'm shooting on auto mode.
Stosbet and I were at the zoo last week and I took my camera along to get some pictures and I noticed an alarming amount of people with DSLR cameras. I saw one girl who couldn't have been older than 10 handling a DSLR. I saw a few families where the mother or father had a Canon or Nikon around their neck snapping quick pictures. A quick look through the viewfinder, let it autofocus, and shoot. No framing, no changing the focal length, just point and shoot, point and shoot. I saw two people who seemed to be professional photographers carefully taking photos, but that's only two out of the probably 50 DSLRs I saw.
The mindset these days is "The more expensive the camera, the better the picture." I know firsthand that's the furthest from the truth. I can take pictures with my $1200 D90 that would be indistinguishable from pictures taken with the $150 Cybershot.
It's like when I was in college and I would tell people I was a writer. So many people would respond, "Me too!" and ask me to read (and ugh, even critique) their poetry and short stories. 90% of them sucked. Hell, 90% of what I wrote sucked, 90% of what any writer sucks, it's why they write so much, to put as much into that 10% as possible.
Now it's the same thing with photography. When I was at a car show a few months ago someone stopped me to compare cameras. He had an older Olympus E-1 and wanted to compare cameras. I tried to tell the guy his camera wasn't bad and that mine wasn't necessarily good, it's your knowledge of the camera that counts but he wasn't listening, he was just drooling over my camera. Of course I do the same thing when I see a Nikon D3 out in the wild. I wouldn't know the first thing to do with it once I got my hands on it but dammit I want one! I want to take $150 photos with a $5000 camera!
Also - as a side story - a woman I work with just recently got married (Very country wedding, her wedding pictures included her doing a keg stand), and said she didn't waste money on a wedding photographer because she could have a friend/family member take pictures for free. I mentioned that Stosbet and I planned on dropping a few grand to get Melanie Grizzel of She-N-He Photography to shoot our wedding. One of my coworkers scoffed at that and said if we gave him a camera he could shoot our wedding. It's like me saying "Why get Michael Andretti to drive your race car when I know how to drive a stick shift?"
I very much agree with the rule that Malcolm Gladwell has in his book Outliers. It takes 10,000 hours of practice in a given field to say you're successful. Could you be making money and be commercially successful before putting in those 10k hours? Absolutely. The main thing is you need to be willing to put in those 10k hours to succeed.
The main thing about photography is to know that everyone does it. If you've taken a picture of yourself in a mirror with your camera phone, congratulations. You're now an amateur photographer. If you've taken a picture of yourself in a mirror with a DSLR, congratulations, everyone thinks you're an asshole. That is unless you're a naked girl then everyone will forgive you. You can thank Myspace for making that possible.
Also, if you plan on taking your photography anywhere, shoot EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. Don't just shoot people you can find on Model Mayhem. Shoot your parents, your friends, even strangers. Hell, shoot me, I have a pronounced forehead (read: Neanderthal forehead) and an oddly shaped nose. Good luck!
That brings me to another point (You can stop reading at this point, I won't blame you. Seriously, I won't.). I look at a lot of photos, whether they be engagement/wedding photos or SG sets and think that the person is ugly or unattractive. What if someone asked me to shoot their wedding, or just take portraits of them and I said "But have you seen your face?" To make my own photography go anywhere I need to start thinking "There are no ugly models, just asshole photographers."
To sum everything up, photography is like any other art, you'll work your ass off while other people try to get by with doing as little as possible. That's why mothers buy their children $800 cameras. They're not trying to expand their children creatively, they're just going by the expensive-is-better line of thought. It's why men buy expensive cameras, because they think it's a great way to get women to take their clothes off.
On that note I'll leave you this one piece of advice that will make every photo you take infinitely better.
Let me put it this way, I used to have a $150 dollar Sony Cybershot. I got some above average pictures from that out of the few hundred I probably took. After that I got a $800 Olympus E-410 (My first DSLR) and got a handful of stellar images, a few above average ones, and a few thousand mediocre ones. With my D90 I've been able to take pictures on par with my E-410 (A camera you can get used with kit lenses for roughly $350 now) while I'm shooting on auto mode.
Stosbet and I were at the zoo last week and I took my camera along to get some pictures and I noticed an alarming amount of people with DSLR cameras. I saw one girl who couldn't have been older than 10 handling a DSLR. I saw a few families where the mother or father had a Canon or Nikon around their neck snapping quick pictures. A quick look through the viewfinder, let it autofocus, and shoot. No framing, no changing the focal length, just point and shoot, point and shoot. I saw two people who seemed to be professional photographers carefully taking photos, but that's only two out of the probably 50 DSLRs I saw.
The mindset these days is "The more expensive the camera, the better the picture." I know firsthand that's the furthest from the truth. I can take pictures with my $1200 D90 that would be indistinguishable from pictures taken with the $150 Cybershot.
It's like when I was in college and I would tell people I was a writer. So many people would respond, "Me too!" and ask me to read (and ugh, even critique) their poetry and short stories. 90% of them sucked. Hell, 90% of what I wrote sucked, 90% of what any writer sucks, it's why they write so much, to put as much into that 10% as possible.
Now it's the same thing with photography. When I was at a car show a few months ago someone stopped me to compare cameras. He had an older Olympus E-1 and wanted to compare cameras. I tried to tell the guy his camera wasn't bad and that mine wasn't necessarily good, it's your knowledge of the camera that counts but he wasn't listening, he was just drooling over my camera. Of course I do the same thing when I see a Nikon D3 out in the wild. I wouldn't know the first thing to do with it once I got my hands on it but dammit I want one! I want to take $150 photos with a $5000 camera!
Also - as a side story - a woman I work with just recently got married (Very country wedding, her wedding pictures included her doing a keg stand), and said she didn't waste money on a wedding photographer because she could have a friend/family member take pictures for free. I mentioned that Stosbet and I planned on dropping a few grand to get Melanie Grizzel of She-N-He Photography to shoot our wedding. One of my coworkers scoffed at that and said if we gave him a camera he could shoot our wedding. It's like me saying "Why get Michael Andretti to drive your race car when I know how to drive a stick shift?"
I very much agree with the rule that Malcolm Gladwell has in his book Outliers. It takes 10,000 hours of practice in a given field to say you're successful. Could you be making money and be commercially successful before putting in those 10k hours? Absolutely. The main thing is you need to be willing to put in those 10k hours to succeed.
The main thing about photography is to know that everyone does it. If you've taken a picture of yourself in a mirror with your camera phone, congratulations. You're now an amateur photographer. If you've taken a picture of yourself in a mirror with a DSLR, congratulations, everyone thinks you're an asshole. That is unless you're a naked girl then everyone will forgive you. You can thank Myspace for making that possible.
Also, if you plan on taking your photography anywhere, shoot EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. Don't just shoot people you can find on Model Mayhem. Shoot your parents, your friends, even strangers. Hell, shoot me, I have a pronounced forehead (read: Neanderthal forehead) and an oddly shaped nose. Good luck!
That brings me to another point (You can stop reading at this point, I won't blame you. Seriously, I won't.). I look at a lot of photos, whether they be engagement/wedding photos or SG sets and think that the person is ugly or unattractive. What if someone asked me to shoot their wedding, or just take portraits of them and I said "But have you seen your face?" To make my own photography go anywhere I need to start thinking "There are no ugly models, just asshole photographers."
To sum everything up, photography is like any other art, you'll work your ass off while other people try to get by with doing as little as possible. That's why mothers buy their children $800 cameras. They're not trying to expand their children creatively, they're just going by the expensive-is-better line of thought. It's why men buy expensive cameras, because they think it's a great way to get women to take their clothes off.
On that note I'll leave you this one piece of advice that will make every photo you take infinitely better.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
warchildrex:
sir...i have quite the man crush on you right now.
deletemeplz:
lol i love the rant. its quite true. I by no means am any type of photographer outside of the fact im inspired to take pictures of toys quite frequently and when i see something nice i like to take a picture of it. I use my husbands i phone and even when i can afford a camera one day it will most likely be a cheap 200.00 camera or something because i dont know the first thing about anything u spoke of 
however ive seen so many people my age with these expensive ass cameras like oh im so deep and moving because i take a picture of a tree or myself in a mirror. .
however ive seen so many people my age with these expensive ass cameras like oh im so deep and moving because i take a picture of a tree or myself in a mirror. .