[deudeu]

I was talking about this with a friend of mine yesterday.
He is a student in Fine arts photography and he told me something that makes sense to me:

With the digital revolution came a new age of photographic illeteracy.

What he meant by that is that with the ability to produce tones of shots without spending any money, people are losing the photographic knowledge they didn't even know they had.

Because of the thousands of snap shots taken and displayed everywhere, the photographic standards are being lowered. The fact that with film, everytime you were pushing the shutter you were spending money, made people more concerned about their technique, their composition, their exposure... Now people press the button without thinking, and they accept the images without thinking as well. Just look at how many actuations our cameras get. Photography, for the majority of people, is becoming about trial and error, not science and love of the medium.

This explains the "nice picture! You must have a good camera" because for most people, taking pictures is less about the skills of the person behind the camera than about the camera itself. With film at least, when one was showing his work, he was always disconected from his tool, and the artifact that he had in his hand, a piece of paper, was simple enough that to the masses, the photographer was what produced the image, not the camera.

But don't get me wrong. I don't miss the days of film only. If I did, I would just go back to film. But I love my digital camera. I just think that for people to appreciate what passionate people do, the passionnate people need to protect their images and threat them with care and respect. I don't want my best pictures to be thrown into a pool of garbage snapshots (by garbage I mean that they don't hold any artisic value, or at least, they were not taken with the intent to be artsy). I don't have anything against snapshots and careless photography, but it is just not what I do.

I don't claim to hold the truth on this though, I am just throwing my opinion out there to see what people are thinking. I am pleased to see that it got people talking!