I’ve been hearing a lot of things concerning photography that genuinely bother me and it’s getting to the point of ridiculous. I know that people are entitled to opinions but I feel that they must first gain perspective before being too critical over some things (if not everything) so please bear with me for a few moments.
I hear often that photography is not an art. Personally I take offense to that, being an amateur photographer myself, but even if I wasn’t, my thoughts still stand. Photography is more of an art than society gives it credit for. I often hear:
“Anyone can become a photographer, it’s really simple.”
“It’s not art, it’s just plain stupid.”
“There’s nothing artistic about it.”
“People that call themselves photographers are just lazy, stupid fucks that are useless to society.” (This one is said about artists as a whole but photographers get it particularly rough.)
Anyway you get the point. I don’t understand how a person can deem photography as stupid and “not artistic” because it’s modern? Taking a good picture isn’t just about knowing the camera itself. One truly must have an artistic eye to know exactly how to capture an image with what angle from what distance, with color or no color, what kind of lens, what kind of filter, what the mood itself is for the image… Photography is not as simple as “point-and-shoot.”
Two people armed with cameras, one with an artistic eye and one completely inexperienced in anything even remotely related to art, can be given a task to take a photo of say….leaves. The inexperienced one would more than likely just hold up a leaf in their hand and take a picture of it, or they’ll just point the camera up in a tree and take that. Heck, they might even just take a picture of some bush somewhere, benches and sidewalks and people everywhere in the image, completely unplotted, and say the focus was on the leaves.
However, the artist with the eye can and will get down in the dirt with their lens just inches from a single, perfect leaf with a single droplet of water attempting to break way just as the shutter releases, capturing that perfect yet innocent image of nature. They would get down on their stomach and capture the endless field of foliage on an autumn afternoon with nothing but grass in the distant background. They would climb a tree to capture the sunlight in that very particular way that just barely manages to hide behind a perfect leave, creating a nice little touch known as a lens flare.
Point is, it takes an artistic eye and mind to be able to find something to capture. It’s not as easy as capturing the first thing you see. Photography requires intense thought and imagination as well as knowledge of your local area to know where to go for the best images.
On top of this, it is not just the process of taking the pictures itself. It is what you do with them once you’re in the dark room. There’s an endless amount of possibilities! Do we want to hand-color it or not? Do we want to use a filter to create contrast within the greyscale or do we want to enhance the greys? Do we want to create a double exposure? Perhaps a three-dimensional image? A collage?
There are other little things one can do such as a panoramic. You could stand in a single spot and take pictures repeatedly, slowly turning as to get a flattened 360 view of your perspective. Or you can take pictures of different angles of a horizon, house, building, etc, and then piece it together like a puzzle while still creating a panoramic collage.
Photography requires more creativity than most can imagine. So please, next time you decide to call photographers lazy, stupid retards useless to society, please do me a favor.
Go fuck yourself.
