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This guy sounds like a definite all-the-gear-no-idea type.
Still, it's a good list, and there's a lot of novelty stuff that does annoy me (HDR being a big one...it'll make your pictures look like mid-nineties 3D renderings.)
Does seem to come of as "there are rules you must never, ever break!"
Some stuff I agree with, some I don't - I think I only qualify for a few, but here's some I'd add, in the spirit of the whole thing and to foster a nice dialogue (read: probably flamewar)...and in good fun, but probably not taste:
* Sh*t-boring landscapes (as a rejoinder to "black and white street photography"): It's 2009, FFS. We now have cameras that don't need to be stuck on a tripod.
* The Zone System. Are the results really any different to what you'd get from centre-weighting it and spending five minutes in Photoshop?
* The filed-out-the-edges-of-the-negative-carrier look. All right, good on ya for using the whole frame. Don't care.
* Taking a picture, and calling it art just because you shot it through a Holga .
* As a nice corollary, Lomography (NB: this bit's probably gonna lose the lighthearted tone of previous list items. This is the only one I'm deadly serious about.) Are you insane? Paying so you can say your pictures are part of certain "genre" and by "genre" I mean private club? Paying hundreds of dollars for cameras the Soviets thought were cheap (there's an LMO RC package in their shop that's $695 US)?
Really, do you know how it was started? A pair of Austrian marketing students, probably off their faces on vodka and borscht, thought it'd be great to hype the crap outta these cameras and sell them to gullible, yet pretentious, idiots. That's the business model (and I admire it, sort, but I wouldn't join.)
That's it. Not some dudes with an artistic vision, but a business plan. Dogbert would be proud.
"Don't think, just shoot", jeez, how about, "Don't think, just pay"?
"Happy accidents" - like what your mum says you were when explaining your birth?
You're not really rebelling or being innovative just because you have a shedload of money to fritter away. Save it and start a real revolution.
* Anyone who buys a Leica as their first camera. I'm glad your dental surgery's going well.
* Family snaps, with no reason behind them except for "He's/She's my husband/wife/daughter/baby/son/cousin/nephew/niece/third cousin twice removed and I love her."
* Studio photography...Ok, I don't really dislike this at all. Some of it's amazing, but it always felt more like interior design to me.
* Whoever comments on a photo "D'you think it's good enough to be like Ansel Adams/Henri Cartier-Bresson/whoever?" Who cares? They're dead.
* Anyone who says you must start out photography on an all-manual camera with no meter and a plain ground-glass focusing screen, shooting slide film. I am sorry for your suffering, when you started out, but pain is not necessarily the teacher.
* Delta 3200 @ 6400 in Rodinal 1:40000000. Die.
* "You shoot at 100 ISO and above? My god, son, are you mad?! The pics'll have grain in them, and faces will be so blurry they'll look like they're in witness protection!"
* Flickr. *dons asbestos* I hate Internet 2.0 (the great big datamining version!) And I'm not sure I want criticism from a good proportion of the net ("Cutie_sexy_princess says i luv ur foto - cum join our groop Furries Who Photograph.") Plus I'm pretty sure Getty can just steal your images off them and flog them, leaving you with zero recourse.
All right. Now this was all in good fun, but go easy, please...
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Originally posted by lithos 
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