In my facebook account I have more than 300 contacts amongst photographers. Professional wedding photographers, wildlife photographers, portrait photographers, sports photographers, dog photographers, cat photographers, landscape photographers, cars photographers, bird photographers, photojournalists, National Geographic photographers, gay photographers, transexual photographers, even a priest photographer, some of them are famous like Frans Lanting, some of them are retired, some of them have just started, some of them are amateurs, some of them just like to snap away.
They come from Australia, USA, Beirut, Iceland, India, the Philippines, Bali, Vietnam, Japan, Canada, South America, Europe, in a few words from all over the world.
After thorough observation, you'd notice that there is not one image that can be confused as belonging to a photographer who was not the one that took it. Their style is always so personal and specific that it really cannot be confused.
This should give the idea of how varied the composition of my photographers contacts in facebook is.
However.
However recently they have all ranted about how much they hate some style of photos.
To be more specific they hate the huge variety of photos that can easily be named "iphoneography".
They don't necessarily have to be taken by an iPhone, but you get the gist, it's photos that have been taken with a mobile phone and then been edited in a way that makes them look like the old Holga or Lomography photos, or any other pinhole or Polaroid effect that was used in the 70's (or earlier than that).
Iphoneography has been around for a while so I must say I was a bit surprised to see that photographers from around the world are starting to break the wall of silence and publicly admit that they are fed up with this kind of photos.
I started wondering whether this is due to the fact that there's more and more users of these gadgets that call themselves photographers.
To be a photographers is (or at least it used to be) so damn hard that maybe the fact that now just about any joe bloggs can win a photography prize as long as he owns a camera phone, a cheap software and a couple of thousands contacts ready to vote for him/her.
Why don't professional photographers like the various hipstamatic, instagram, etc....?
Is that because it's too easy to take a photo? Now, see, notice that I didn't say "a good photo", because personally I don't think those kinds of photos are, for all aesthetic purposes, good.
Interesting, quirk, funny, maybe, but good?
What makes a good photo, good?
I won't delve into that, it would probably take me all my life to come to terms with the many criteria that books and teachers proclaim about the canons of photography, let's just say that I will stick to what I personally believe distinguish a bad photo from a good photo.
And even this task is not that easy,
I wish I could just summarise all I'm thinking of into one word, but I can just see anyone reading this blog going "Nah!" at whatever word I might come up with so here we go:
-light, or rather, exposure, I might be boring but if a photo has wrong exposure, sorry, no good
-focus, and I don't mean that everything should be on focus, I mean that the focus should be correct as per the intention of the photographer (if someone wants to experiment with depth of field, fine by me, but there always has to be intention behind it, not just randomness, I don't believe in "happy mistakes", they are extremely rare, if you made a mistake with the focus and you're trying to pass it as intentional you're taking short cuts, you can fool the world for a while but not forever)
-composition (again, no happy mistakes please, if you're cutting off the head of a subject you're not artistic you're plain bad)
-white balance (it doesn't matter that nowadays no one knows what it is because the Auto settings on our cameras do everything for us and I must say it does it in a pretty good way, I STILL adjust the white balance in RAW photos)
...well I could go on talking about saturation etc.. but I just realised that after 29 years of taking photos I might have become a bit strict.
I guess it comes with the thousands of hours spent learning, studying, practicing, clicking, clicking and clicking again... not to mention the money I've spent.... (jeez, let's NOT think about that).
But all in all, if these photos taken with a phone are so obviously not good, why do they bother us photographers so much?
If it's bad it's bad and that's all, why paying so much attention to it????
Why going all the way and be so annoyed by this phenomenon that some of us feel the need to express it publicly and say that they HATE them?
I mean, hate is a strong word! It denotes strong feelings that were rarely seen in the past.
Is that because a banal photo of a guy slurping a slushie with a pink straw can get 897.342 likes in Instagram while an amazing ultra wide angle of a couple of Gentoo penguins at dusk in the wild taken while ice-camping in Antarctica with gear that amounts to 15 grands and days of research and wait and hours of laying freezing on my stomach staying as still as possible not to scare them away only gets a couple of prizes in wildlife photography contests?
Well, if we look at it this way....
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPhone and I downloaded heaps of apps to edit photos and I have an Instagram account and I use it too! But that goes with the fact that every photographer is, ultimately, a geek! If it's remotely connected to photography I must have it!
I guess it's the only thing where commercials don't go unobserved on me.
Only just recently they started showing the ad on tv about the new OM D by Olympus.... I have to change channel, otherwise I know that I will start googling it and find out what it is and in short I will want it.
Anyway, my conclusion is that maybe iPhoneography should not be called photography and in this way there should be a distinct separation between these 2 disciplines.
Can we agree to call Photography an art and iPhoneography a phenomenon?
Would that make the fellow photogs a bit less grumpy?
They come from Australia, USA, Beirut, Iceland, India, the Philippines, Bali, Vietnam, Japan, Canada, South America, Europe, in a few words from all over the world.
After thorough observation, you'd notice that there is not one image that can be confused as belonging to a photographer who was not the one that took it. Their style is always so personal and specific that it really cannot be confused.
This should give the idea of how varied the composition of my photographers contacts in facebook is.
However.
However recently they have all ranted about how much they hate some style of photos.
To be more specific they hate the huge variety of photos that can easily be named "iphoneography".
They don't necessarily have to be taken by an iPhone, but you get the gist, it's photos that have been taken with a mobile phone and then been edited in a way that makes them look like the old Holga or Lomography photos, or any other pinhole or Polaroid effect that was used in the 70's (or earlier than that).
Iphoneography has been around for a while so I must say I was a bit surprised to see that photographers from around the world are starting to break the wall of silence and publicly admit that they are fed up with this kind of photos.
I started wondering whether this is due to the fact that there's more and more users of these gadgets that call themselves photographers.
To be a photographers is (or at least it used to be) so damn hard that maybe the fact that now just about any joe bloggs can win a photography prize as long as he owns a camera phone, a cheap software and a couple of thousands contacts ready to vote for him/her.
Why don't professional photographers like the various hipstamatic, instagram, etc....?
Is that because it's too easy to take a photo? Now, see, notice that I didn't say "a good photo", because personally I don't think those kinds of photos are, for all aesthetic purposes, good.
Interesting, quirk, funny, maybe, but good?
What makes a good photo, good?
I won't delve into that, it would probably take me all my life to come to terms with the many criteria that books and teachers proclaim about the canons of photography, let's just say that I will stick to what I personally believe distinguish a bad photo from a good photo.
And even this task is not that easy,
I wish I could just summarise all I'm thinking of into one word, but I can just see anyone reading this blog going "Nah!" at whatever word I might come up with so here we go:
-light, or rather, exposure, I might be boring but if a photo has wrong exposure, sorry, no good
-focus, and I don't mean that everything should be on focus, I mean that the focus should be correct as per the intention of the photographer (if someone wants to experiment with depth of field, fine by me, but there always has to be intention behind it, not just randomness, I don't believe in "happy mistakes", they are extremely rare, if you made a mistake with the focus and you're trying to pass it as intentional you're taking short cuts, you can fool the world for a while but not forever)
-composition (again, no happy mistakes please, if you're cutting off the head of a subject you're not artistic you're plain bad)
-white balance (it doesn't matter that nowadays no one knows what it is because the Auto settings on our cameras do everything for us and I must say it does it in a pretty good way, I STILL adjust the white balance in RAW photos)
...well I could go on talking about saturation etc.. but I just realised that after 29 years of taking photos I might have become a bit strict.
I guess it comes with the thousands of hours spent learning, studying, practicing, clicking, clicking and clicking again... not to mention the money I've spent.... (jeez, let's NOT think about that).
But all in all, if these photos taken with a phone are so obviously not good, why do they bother us photographers so much?
If it's bad it's bad and that's all, why paying so much attention to it????
Why going all the way and be so annoyed by this phenomenon that some of us feel the need to express it publicly and say that they HATE them?
I mean, hate is a strong word! It denotes strong feelings that were rarely seen in the past.
Is that because a banal photo of a guy slurping a slushie with a pink straw can get 897.342 likes in Instagram while an amazing ultra wide angle of a couple of Gentoo penguins at dusk in the wild taken while ice-camping in Antarctica with gear that amounts to 15 grands and days of research and wait and hours of laying freezing on my stomach staying as still as possible not to scare them away only gets a couple of prizes in wildlife photography contests?
Well, if we look at it this way....
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPhone and I downloaded heaps of apps to edit photos and I have an Instagram account and I use it too! But that goes with the fact that every photographer is, ultimately, a geek! If it's remotely connected to photography I must have it!
I guess it's the only thing where commercials don't go unobserved on me.
Only just recently they started showing the ad on tv about the new OM D by Olympus.... I have to change channel, otherwise I know that I will start googling it and find out what it is and in short I will want it.
Anyway, my conclusion is that maybe iPhoneography should not be called photography and in this way there should be a distinct separation between these 2 disciplines.
Can we agree to call Photography an art and iPhoneography a phenomenon?
Would that make the fellow photogs a bit less grumpy?
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