Originally Posted by Lowell Goudge
Since the cameras are so cheap, and there is no developing, people take more images, and it only takes one. see above, people can get lucky also.
That's a great thing for all of us, wouldn't you agree? It means there is opportunity for all to excel. But I don't think it spells the end of the pro photog. It just means there will be more ametuers like myself. I hardly pose a threat to the pro's.
10,000,000 pictures of someone's toddler having fun in the sand box, even if one happens to get lucky and catch the kid in a really cute pose, is still just 10,000,000 pictures of someone's toddler having fun in the sand box.
I've probably taken hundreds of thousands of images with a digital camera and have yet to capture anything close to the work of benjikan or Max Lyons.
Luck is luck, but good photographic composition is not. If someone doesn't know anything about professional composition and just takes pictures with the hope of getting lucky, they are beating at the air. You can take all the pictures you want, but if you don't have a plan and learn (i.e. become a professional), you will never produce professional results enough to make a difference to a pro's business plan. Just like the fact that I change my own filters, oil, and spark plugs becuase it's very easy to do hardly compromises the auto mechanic industry. Most people would still rather take their car to a pro because they don't have time to do it themselves (their time is money too) or they simply don't care to know how.
The fact is, the major threat the ametuer crowd poses to a pro are the handful that have a plan and are practicing to succeed and some day become a pro. They call this type of person a student.
This threat has always existed and always will in any profession or skill. The DSLR has just made it cheaper to learn and changed the product possibilities. But the student still needs motivation to continue on to the pro level.
You can take 10,000,000 pictures, but if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.
