Photography the hard way
A fine B&W photography artist recently posted this short "video rant" on Youtube.
However, about the notion that "people don't give a shit" about the details of photography:
Of course they don't, and of course that's to be applauded as well.
Anyone else here remember the good old days of broadcast television, when you might have to rotate the outdoor antenna for the best signal, then tweak the horizontal and vertical sync controls on the receiver to capture the picture? Color made it even more fun, with the 6+ other controls to adjust the color gain and tint. It was a lot like shutter speed and aperture - knowing how these things worked made you a master of the TV set. Suddenly, you were The One that could operate the TV for everyone else. I achieved that status when I was pretty young (I'm not yet 50 years old), and I was proud of myself for developing those special skills. My status was elevated because I was the guy that could tune the TV.
Today, I'm much happier to turn on the TV and be dazzled with 1080i video that doesn't flutter from multipath when a jet passes nearby and quiet multichannel audio. Toddlers can turn on TV and tune-in Jersey Shore all by themselves. No one needs my TV-tuning skills any more.
Another one of my interests is amateur radio. Back when I first got into it, you had to manually tune-up transmitters, even for relatively small frequency changes. I developed the skill to send and receive Morse Code by hand/ear. It took Real Skills to communicate by radio, and interconnecting a radio with a telephone was Black Magic.
Now, we pick up cell phones and call people most anywhere in the world. No skills required. No one needs my Black Magic radio skills any more.
Further, those phones even include cameras!!! Sure, I thought cell-phone cameras were ridiculous, and the vast majority of them produce images comparable to those cheap 110 cameras of the 1970s. Point-and-shoot cameras today, though, do an amazing job of balancing fill-flash, figuring out where the faces are, etc. It used to require a lot of skill to do what a cheap camera automatically does today.
As a result, anyone who wants to take pretty darn good pictures is able to today, at virtually no recurring cost whatsoever, so people take photos whenever, wherever, for whatever reason. It's not the old days when each snapshot cost at least the better part of a quarter.
Sure, there are a lot of really ridiculous/lousy photos being captured with no concern at all for technical details. People really just don't give a shit, just like Adrienne says.
So what have we lost? Mostly, practitioners of photography have lost the elevated status that our technical skills used to bring. Film has become a boutique item - and, let's just be brutally honest, photographic film is basically like plastic water bottles - added cost that conveys no value by itself. It's the image you really want (and there are better ways to archive images than silver halide film anyway).
Every time a wonderful, complicated complicated technology is developed to the point where anyone can successfully use it with virtually no training, that's progress, that's a good thing.
But - it always challenges those of us who were the Black Magicians to move on when no one gives a shit about our skills any longer.