Wednesday 28 May 2014

Taking a photograph does not make you a photographer


Summer time: good weather and people in good spirit. Facebook is overflowing with selfies of happy people and their friends however some over-ambitions, professional photographer wannabe has uploaded some pictures that have no significance to themselves - or anyone for that matter. The photo is just of a landscape. Why have they uploaded this?

Uploading pictures of hills, fields or dunes is only acceptable if the 'photographer' has taken into consideration focus, aperture, shutter speed, lighting and other variables, or if it is taken with a SLR camera because at least then it means the quality of the pictures are high. However, if a person has just pointed their mobile phone's camera at a landscape and pressed 'capture' without thinking, the photos should no be going on Facebook or any social networking site (apart from Flickr - because nobody really uses that any-more).

The quality is low (most of the time anyway), which means that even if your view is good, you're not capturing colours correctly and when enlarged the photo can become pixelated. But most importantly, nobody cares; even the people who were with you at the time are more lightly to 'like' and comment on the photos that they are in rather than some landscape which may have well have just been found on Google Image Search. If it is a decent landscape you're photographing, there will be hundreds - if not thousands - of pictures of it which are easy to find with a simple image search - which makes the image very impersonal - however if it's not a good landscape, don't take the photo at all. And if you do take it and upload it, do not have the courage to call yourself a photographer... because your not... not even close to armature photographer!

To conclude, when having a whale-of-a-time walking through the countryside or at the beach, feel free to upload thousands of pictures of you and your friends/family however don't upload random pictures with no human subject; nobody wants to see it.