Hi, everyone. Hope you have had a great day or two since we last met here on the blog. Has your head quit hurting yet? Have you had time to consider the question I posed in the last blog? Have you even been able to make any sense of what I was babbling about? Well, let me see if I can put a fla..ah..light on it.
First let’s kind of bring the last blog into a summary. In short, many things in life (in my opinion) including photography have gone by the way of the old service station attendants. They along with the old style service stations are all but gone in America. The value of having a person giving basic maintenance on your car while pumping gas into your tank has changed over the years starting with the saving of a few pennies per gallon. In the last blog I discussed that while we may have saved a few pennies it ultimately cost us in higher repair and replacement costs. This I said was due to the fact that the service station attendants haven’t gone away. All of us have become service station attendants whether we care to admit it or not and we do a really bad job of it because we only worry about the need of the moment and not any future consequences that might come as a result. It all comes down to the fact that our ideas of convenience and how our ideas of what is true and important change with the wind direction. And after 1471 word in the last blog the whole thing boiled down to this question. What is your definition of a professional photographer? The point being that as time and technology has changed so has our perception of what a photographer is and what value the pros really are. And let’s not stop at the customer. What is the perception of the new would be photogs that are entering into the arena? If you’re brave enough, go back and read the previous post and then come back and see if I can really tie this whole thing together.
I will try to explain by paralleling the service station attendant with the pro photographer in an attempt to prove that I’m not really off my rocker. As with service station attendants, the pro photographer in the film days had a great deal of value and convenience because for those important events it was the pros who had the knowledge and equipment (and for the time that equipment was not cheap!) to get good photos because unlike digital photography of the day you didn’t know if you got the shot until in came back from development weeks later. There was no way for the average citizen to edit the photos themselves very easily and it was very costly, too costly for the average Joe citizen. But it could be done. I spent hundreds of hours I’d bet in the basement of the church where my father was the pastor in the kitchen developing black and white prints and developing my own film. Boy what a time, I really do miss that stuff and wouldn’t pass up the chance to do it again if the opportunity came up. We were experts at “pushing asa” which meant that we would take some 400 asa (asa is the film sensitivity version of the digital ISO nowadays) and shot the film at a much higher setting (usually 1000 asa) so we could take photos in low light situations such as football and basketball events were higher shutter speeds were needed. It was fun but boy was it time consuming and expensive to do. For the vast majority it was just more convenient to go to the pros. The pros charged some pretty high prices but they had to as the time and cost of equipment and processing was so high. The pros had to get all aspects of the picture right in the camera without being able to view the photo to make adjustments on the spot as we now can with digital. That took skill and the more experience the pro had and the better the composition of the photo the more they were in demand and the more money they could ask for. But with the advent of the home computer age and the development of the digital camera technology, people were able to get their hands on a digital camera and edit them on their computers and set on the old automatic setting found that they could get some mighty fine looking pictures themselves as compared to what they use to get with the old Kodak 104 and 110s. The pictures were “good enough” that a lot of people started changing their definition of what a professional photographer was. Not just the consumer but the photogs themselves. Much like as prices went up on fuel we thought we could become a service station attendant ourselves and do just as good a job for less money, besides, just how hard could that all be. As with the evolving of the service station and their attendant, so did the world of photography began to mutate and I chose to use that word for a reason. As the station attendant became convenience store clerks with most of them not know what a dip stick is let along where to find it or how to check it, many of the “pro photographers” are emerging into the field not even knowing what and F stop is or how to adjust the shutter speed because all they do is put the camera in automatic mode and shazam their a pro photographer. How do they get away with that? Because the pictures they take are “good enough” when you compare the price with that of a person who really does know what an F stop is. For the customer, they think that if the picture is clear and in focus, then it’s a good pro type photo not realizing that while the technology has improved for the everyday consumer, it has also improved for the pros as well and that means the consumer is unknowingly settling for “good enough” not realizing that there are consequences looming on the horizon. And as technology puts a camera in almost every cell phone and the compact cameras get cheaper, well everyone has now become the photography version of the service station attendant. While getting a picture is much the same as getting gas in the tank, it’s the stuff that’s being missed or choosing to ignore that is really the story here. The consumer don’t know what their missing and the new want-to-be pros don’t what to trouble themselves because why should they? It’s the convenience and the perception of saving money, time, and effort that matters and up till now there hasn’t been a mass amount consequence. In short, it seems that the definition for a pro photographer has mutated. In my humble opinion the standards for what makes up a pro has really been lowered because of the distortion of the truth or the failure to see the truth because it’s not convenient to do so at that moment. I’m afraid that the definition of pro photographer has been permanently changed. Not because of the truth but because of convenience.
So, because of the advance in technology, everyone is a great photographer. Don’t believe me? Just ask them, they’ll tell you and then show you on their phone. So where does that leave the “real pros”. Like the service station attendants, do we learn how to cook chicken and stock shelves? My idea might surprise you, but you’ll have some time to think about it yourself before I share my thoughts with you. You see, I have become mindful of my graphic arts guy who worries about how long it takes me to write these things. Personally, I think he doesn’t like to read that much or at least for long periods of time. But I guess I should be great full that someone cares! Thanks Chris!
Well until next time (and I sure you’re on pins and needles waiting to hear my thoughts on the rest of this venture) have a great day everyone!
Richard
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