Mastery Is Useful

Mahn England asked yesterday, "How the hell did we ever manage to take photo images before the latest editions of hardware came along?"

The answer, of course, is that we worked harder. You could almost—maybe not quite—cast the entire history of photo-tech as a relentless march toward greater and greater convenience. Photography is so convenient these days that sometimes I have trouble concentrating on the most basic part of my job, which is to figure out where best to stand, what angle of view to use, and how to frame the picture. It was actually great for discipline to have to pay a few cents every time you pushed the shutter button.

As a late adopter of cellphones (quaintly thinking of them only as phones, instead of the amazing bundle of varied functionality a smartphone actually is...weather station, oral navigator while driving, electronic book, camera, reference librarian, and a thousand other things), I can't believe what a short time ago it was when the idea of taking a picture and sending it to someone immediately was an exotic idea to me, just a little difficult at first to get my head around. It had to be explained to me. I could probably find it in the blog, if I worked at it, and nail down the date. It wasn't that long ago. Now, I will make and send a movie in the middle of a conversation.

Convenience is good, of course. But of course, as with everything, you lose a little, too. Everyone is familiar with Ansel Adams's prognostications in the early '80s about "electronic photography" being the coming thing. They're not so familiar with his lamentations about photography getting too easy, and wishing it would somehow get harder to do. I don't think he'd be happy with that aspect of "imaging" today. Convenience sure is convenient, but mastery is also useful; learning something in depth pays off in ways that superficial facility (I mean "facile-ness") can't touch.

...There, now you've read enough of this and have got the gist. Now you can quick skip to the end to see if this article offers any morsel of conclusion that might be worth scooping up. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, eu per iuvaret quaeque mediocrem, meis nusquam ei his. Illum dolorum civibus te mel. Elitr invidunt ex quo, vel facilisi mandamus vulputate cu, qui essent neglegentur ea. Ad commune omittantur mei, possim conclusionemque nec at. Mel simul facilis omittantur cu, eum id decore albucius, enim esse volutpat ut has.

Ne vidit quando salutandi sea, ex has veritus accusamus. Et vim aeque omnes. Cum choro nemore perfecto ea, pri justo dicta corpora no. Eruditi reprehendunt an eam, dicat veritus nominavi ei sed, sed ea magna imperdiet. Nam tollit libris facilis ex, aliquam accusamus ut vel, vel et ipsum clita cetero. Ut vel apeirian detraxit, quo quaestio sapientem ex, an tale denique delicatissimi est.

Graeco voluptatibus cu sed, legere inimicus reformidans mel ei, per et fabellas forensibus contentiones. Vivendum sensibus euripidis mea an, alii inani pro te. Mea ut alia zril sadipscing, ne cum commune sadipscing. Odio probo omnes qui ad. Illud alienum eum et, vim mazim possim eleifend et.

Est dicant discere efficiantur an, ferri noster voluptatibus ne his. Duo eu nemore audiam. Prima vocent eam an, adolescens scribentur eu vim, impetus repudiare et pri. Cu recteque salutandi similique eam, saepe fuisset probatus quo ne. Per ex possim scripta dissentias, wisi nominati euripidis est in, dico mandamus electram ad pri. Graeco voluptatibus cu sed, legere inimicus reformidans mel ei, per et fabellas forensibus contentiones. Vivendum sensibus euripidis mea an, alii inani pro te. Mea ut alia zril sadipscing, ne cum commune sadipscing. Odio probo omnes qui ad. Illud alienum eum et, vim mazim possim eleifend et.

Te veniam doctus eos. No amet probatus sea. Sed te dolor commune, sed probo aliquip scripta eu, delenit assueverit sed ex. Populo cetero patrioque pro ex. Vix at summo recusabo maluisset, an cum augue legimus copiosae. Sadipscing reprehendunt ea eam. Dolore nostrud reformidans an mel.

You see what I did there. Now, anyone who reads half of this article has also read all of it! Perfect. The canny blogger wins.  :-)  Anyway, I'm certainly not saying that everyone should master everything. But it might be good advice for everyone to master something*.

Mike
(Thanks to Mahn England and Graham Byrnes)

*I pick salads. I'm going to master salads.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

[Ed. Note: I'm featuring part of Graham's comment on this post even though he wrote it in response to yesterday's, because it speaks to the metatopic of this one, namely, the average surfer reading only half of articles they read on the Internet. Hope you don't mind, Graham.]

Graham Byrnes (partial comment): "'Many a statistician has drowned in a river whose average depth was only three feet.' If the average reader reads half of the average article, she probably reads all of 10% and only the first line of the rest. Why? Because internet articles are struggling desperately for clicks, and so they court controversy with inflammatory hypotheses. The reader gets sucked in, clicks through, realises there is no real content, and leaves. Occasionally, someone taps into an existing reservoir of passion, such as 'My Canon is bigger than your...errhh, Nikon,' and the small proportion of obsessives read to the end. And comment. And defend their comments, and so on."

Mike replies: Speaking of clickbait, one of my favorite quotes was something Jerry Garcia said after the release of the album "Shakedown Street," which sounded insufficiently Deadish and suspiciously poppish to some fans, when he was asked if maybe the band was selling out. He said, "We'd be happy to sell out, if only we knew how." I'd be more than happy to put up click-bait if it would draw a huge audience. Occasionally I try. I don't really know how.

Burt Porter: "Mike, the second half of your column today is complete nonsense, although I did learn the interesting history of 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.' As always, thanks for a thought-provoking bit of fun."

Mike replies: To quote the Lorem Ipsum Generator site: "Lorem ipsum is a pseudo-Latin text used in web design, typography, layout, and printing in place of English to emphasize design elements over content. It's also called placeholder (or filler) text. It's a convenient tool for mock-ups. It helps to outline the visual elements of a document or presentation, e.g. typography, font, or layout. Lorem ipsum is mostly a part of a Latin text by the classical author and philosopher Cicero. Its words and letters have been changed by addition or removal, so as to deliberately render its content nonsensical...."

Gordon Lewis: "In response to your response to Graham Byrne's comment, it's easy to generate clickbait as long as you don't let things such as conscience, standards, intellectual rigor, and critical thinking get in your way. Rid yourself of these obstacles and the clickbait content will flow like sewage."

Steve Jacob: Well, so much for average readers, I just found a translation of Cicero's original Latin from which Lorem ipsum was garbled.

Actually quite interesting and surprising relevant to the main topic of the post....

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.

No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.

To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided.

But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Mike replies: See also John Seidel's comment in the Comments Section.

And did you know that in classical Latin, Cicero is not pronounced "SISS-uh-row," like Cicero, Illinois, but CHEE-chuh-row? True. Go to this link and click the loudspeaker icon under the right-hand word to hear it. [UPDATE: This might not be right. Several readers say in classical Latin it would be "KI- kuh-ro" with a hard "k," and that "CHEE-chuh-row" is Church Latin or modern Italian.]

The fun fact I learned today is that carrots were originally purple, and orange carrots are a relatively recent hybridizing development. Naturally, the purple carrots were better for you. Are we getting far afield?

Michael Barker replies to Steve Jacob: "Thanks for posting that vanilla lorem ipsum, but I must admit that I only read the first two paragraphs and then skipped to the end."

Sven Erikson: "Working with a large format view camera is one of the most rewarding, and also most frustrating, things I do as a photographer. It's all manual, it's slow, it's heavy, and every shot costs me $2 to $20 depending on the film. Some days it's worth it. Other days, it seems like a pointless anachronism, and I just end up missing good shots that I could have captured with my cheap DSLR and kit lens."

Herb Cunningham: "A good parallel is learning how to make furniture with hand tools before getting all the modern shop equipment. Those of us who started out 50 years and more ago can appreciate the need to pay attention to every detail. Yogi said: you can see a lot by looking."

Benjamin Marks: "Ugh. Keep TOP a Kardashian-free zone. Oops. Except now it isn't any more."

Mike replies: What's a "Kardashian"? A kind of scarf?

Roger Bradbury replies to Mike: "you don't know because you are not a science fiction fan, but Kardashians are an alien species in 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.' I hope this helps.  ;-)"

Mark Kinsman replies to Mike: "It's an option available for pickup trucks as in, 'can I get it with the Kardashian option?'—also referred to as DRW (Dual Rear Wheels)."

Autipode: "How many have you made with a smart phone good enough to print large and hang on the wall or make part of your portfolio? Zip, for me. Maybe I only need a fancier smart phone. Right."

Mahn England: "Having been mentioned in dispatches I now feel duty bound to relate a story in which my 'mastery' was questioned. A friend who is an artist of the etching variety and I packed up the Land Rover and went bush for a weekend’s R and R. Having setup the camera on the tripod for some 'slow photography' I set about observing, composing and finally taking some shots. Meanwhile Nicky was sketching away. A couple of bushwalkers wandered past. One was carrying a camera. The camera-less one observed Nicky’s activity and turned to me and proclaimed that all I needed to do was press a button. The camera-carrying one looked aghast and I responded: 'not really.' Nicky had the good grace to say nothing. It looks easy but it isn’t because pressing the button is of course merely a small part of a process. Two shots from that weekend I printed and now hang on the wall."

Lenya Ryzhik: "I could not agree more. I remember vividly the arguments in the newspapers back in 1880s, with the introduction of Kodak. Things only went downhill from there. George Eastman killed serious photography."

dan: "Lorem Ipsum makes one hell of a mat print paper."

Rod S.: "I came to the comments section to say how much I enjoyed reading the featured comment by Steve Jacobs in which he provides the unadulterated original Latin from Cicero. That's amazing, and something to pursue further. But in doing so I was stopped dead by Ed Cornachio's beautiful prose in his 'comment' headed 'When?' ('Comment' is too banal a noun here). It brought tears to my eyes. That's something to keep and consider at length. Finally, Michael Perini summed up the problem with the ease of the New Photography succinctly. After pointing out the obvious benefits, he nails the big downside thus: The more 'casual photography' there is, the harder it become for some photography to be taken seriously. There will always be those who do whatever it takes to produce obviously great work and we are all better for their efforts. This discussion has personal meaning for me because my still-recent transition to 4x5" large format photography has been a total revelation to me. Thank you, Steve, Ed and Michael."

David Brown: "Taking pictures is easier than ever. Making good photographs is as hard as it ever was."

Mike replies: ...And that's a nice comment on which to wrap up the Featured Comments for this post. Thanks to all. That was fun.

Comments

[Winwalloe]

If someone takes photos you like, you can follow this photographer on his/her medium of choice.
If you don't like the work of this photographer... you don't.

As consumers we can also be our own content editors.

[Geoff Wittig]

I actually took several years of Latin in high school (thank the Jesuits) and oddly enough found it quite useful, because many medical abbreviations and some jargon are based on Latin roots.
So I was initially tempted to try translating the above paragraphs for chuckles. Then I realized that my Latin/English dictionary is buried deep in the piles in my library, and the urge passed. On-line dictionaries feel too much like cheating.
My youngest child took a semester of Latin in college for part of his humanities requirement. I encouraged him when he asked if it was a good idea. I had unfortunately forgotten how extremely demanding Latin study is, at least at the start: an enormous amount of memorization to get the declensions and basic grammar straight. My son dourly noted that the Latin class monopolized 75% of his study time for 20% of his course work. "Thanks a lot, Dad".
Oops.

[Robert Hudyma]

Ne lectio quicumque eximo.

[mike plews]

I think there's a small backlash out there against the ease of digital photography. On Facebook I keep up with people doing film, LF and alternative process work.
There's a pleasure in mastering something a little difficult. Silver Gelatin printing takes time and effort to master and handing someone a print you made yourself has a special pleasure to it.
It's why I still have a darkroom and at 66 I still get a kick out of watching a print come up in the tray. Photographers who have only shot digital got screwed out of that experience and that's sad. Gotta go my camera is ringing.

[Bob Cook]

The cell phone is to photography what desk-top publishing was to pride in authorship.

[Charles Tuttle]

You might try tagging the occasional post NSFW. I suspect this works like a charm at some sites.

[Andy F]

Photography is so convenient these days that sometimes I have trouble concentrating on the most basic part of my job, which is to figure out where best to stand, what angle of view to use, and how to frame the picture.

I find the opposite: since I don't have to think about film costs, winding the camera/cocking the shutter, metering (since my camera has an EVF and live histogram – I just spin the exposure compensation dial until it looks right) or even, to a large extent, ISO or shutter speed (since both are on auto most of the time), my mind is free to focus exclusively on the things you mentioned.

This is generally why I think phones are great beginner photography tools – they let you ignore the things that are largely academic to concentrate on what, imo, are the important things: "where best to stand, what angle of view to use, and how to frame the picture."

[psu]

I've never been sympathetic to arguments that making something easier somehow cheapens the work. Didn't someone once say that no on cares how hard you worked for a picture?

Still, I can't disagree with the idea that actually getting good at something is worthwhile; but in photography many people are confused about what it is they should master. They concentrate on things that don't really matter that much (exposure, focus, white balance, sharpness, etc) and never get good at what does matter (subject matter, emotional connection, visual style, etc). Most of the new tools make the first set of things easier and more convenient, but do little about the important bits. Interestingly most complaints about how photography is "too easy" also concentrate on the technical issues, which I think is misguided.

[Robert Newcomb]

Hey, I read the whole thing, even the middle.
Translation
"Even when a visitor saw the sea, and has hesitated to denounce. And force all equally. When the Choir is that no one is perfect, the bodies of the first just said no. Find fault with or for the learned, he may say to him, mentioned the name of, but afraid of, but amounted to a great hairstyle. Easy because it takes away from the books of, someone in to do either, or, and he ipsum in the future. Ut vel, accurate, has taken away, by which the question from a wise man, or such, lastly, delicatissimi is.

But with the pleasures of the Greek, fearing the enemy's honey to the argument by the bar, and the stories about the strife. Of Euripides, the senses of my instructions or to live because, some empty in your place. My Zril sadipscing so that the other, not being authorized by stet. Despite all that to prove. This is foreign to him, and, the power of Japan and be able to mazim.

Say it is not to learn? Or, of iron, our pleasure, even these things. Two football nobody listens. The first call with or, and a youth were written, its strength, the impact of divorce, and the highest. Cu ordered to pay like it had been approved, which is not often. Through the writings may disagree simmer renowned euripidis to say we electram to first. But with the pleasures of the Greek, fearing the enemy's honey to the argument by the bar, and the stories about the strife. Of Euripides, the senses of my instructions or to live because, some empty in your place. My Zril sadipscing so that the other, not being authorized by stet. Despite all that to prove. This is foreign to him, and, the power of Japan and be able to mazim.

I have taught them. No boring approved sea. But you shared your grief, I will show that aliquip's football, delenit assueverit but from the. Finally, on behalf of the people of his father. Hardly at the top refuse preferred, or with propaganda read lights. Voluptua blame it for her. Nostrud fearing pain or honey."

Not sure I understand it, but I did read it.

[jim woodard]

do you have any idea how long it takes to translate all that latin?

[c.d.embrey]

What could be easier than a Nikon F? A simple camera with few controls to master and a 100% viewfinder for precise framing. And no pesky menus.

Blogs, forums and rumor sites are becoming a complete wast of time. Lots of click-bait with little substance and a lot of faulty info. Some of the better blogs blogs don't deliver like they used to — it seems like they (unlike Mike) have said all that they have to say. Also some bloggers, as they become less relevant, become peevish and display a lot of bad attitude — who needs that.

[John Seidel]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet to you to, suckermucker! I come here for high-brow, thought provoking, grade-a stuff and you give us this. I thought it was all fakery, but then I found this: "`Lorem ipsum dolor' is the first part of a nonsense paragraph sometimes used to demonstrate a font. It has been well established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at the font. The ``gibberish'' below is sufficiently like ordinary text to demonstrate a font but doesn't distract the reader. Hopefully.

Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine, Volume 4 Number 2.:

[quote]

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"
No doubt you already knew this when you "click-baited" us.

[Manuel]

Some would be surprised to know, especially after what you wrote about Ansel Adams' late views on photography, that he was a keen supporter of Polaroid who worked on the concept of instant photography with Edwin Land. Life can be ironic.

Yet he was right. Photography is facing the paradox of being more popular and disseminated, and yet steadily becoming more of an irrelevance. As you say, it's all about convenience, but the constant push for convenience led us to where we are today: billions of irrelevant photographs are taken every second, turning photography into something banal. Who cares about a particular photography, no matter how great it is? It's just one more picture.

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth going on photographing. I live in a town full of tourists (the ten plagues of Egypt are nothing but a small nuisance compared to them) and I admit to being ashamed of carrying my camera when I come across them. I gave up on facebook long ago and, quite frankly, am in a process of pondering whether I still want to photograph. How can there be any originality and uniqueness in something everybody does? And who will pay attention to what I do if photography is so widely used nowadays? I'm just another guy taking shots. And nobody looks at a photograph for more than a few seconds: they just make an instantaneous judgement based solely on aesthetics and the recognition of the subject. So why bother trying to make a meaningful picture?

Even if I found a way to circumvent the 'facile-ness' of photographing by turning to film, photography does no longer strike me as a means of expressing originality. Even if we only consider its 'artistic' aspect, it is so crowded of Cartier-Bresson and McCurry's wannabes that no one in his right mind will give a toss about photography; any pretense of making photography as a form of expressing oneself artistically is subject to derision, and any good photography that is eventually made will be smothered by an avalanche of selfies and banal snapshots.

So, like Ansel Adams, I wish photographing were harder. Call me bigoted, if you want to, but it would be great for photography if all cellphones' cameras suddenly broke down. As it stands now, things are getting the proportions of an overdose.

[Dennis]

"I'd be more than happy to put up click-bait if it would draw a huge audience. Occasionally I try. I just don't know how."

That's no surprise ... having read many of your posts in which you go out of your way to explain your thoughts in an effort to avoid having them taken the wrong way, it seems that click-bait content would be alien to you. In a way, it's kind of like photographing for "likes". You throw away every last shred of integrity; you dissociate yourself from the content that you're producing; you take a cynical look at the market, and come up with a calculated approach to your work. Sounds miserable !

On the topic of mastery, I think that it's a fine thing that automation has made photography easier. What we have is more and more of the worlds population taking pictures that are "competent" (reasonably sharp and reasonably well exposed and enjoyable for somebody to look at) and then a small portion of the population working as hard as ever to produce really good photography. (I don't include myself in that, by the way !) Sure, technology makes it easy to go out and take a decent enough shot, but success still requires hard work, whether it's mastering lighting, learning your subject, or hiking for days on end, all the technology in the world isn't going to let dilettantes like myself match their work.

[Gato]

I tried to read the whole thing. Google translate was not much help:

"But with the pleasures of the Greek, fearing the enemy's honey to the argument by the bar, and the stories about the strife. Of Euripides, the senses of my instructions or to live because, some empty in your place. My Zril sadipscing so that the other, not being authorized by stet. Despite all that to prove. This is foreign to him, and, the power of Japan and be able to mazim."

More seriously, I find my patience with longer writing growing short, but at the same time I complain that some of my favorite magazine sites are moving to shorter articles.

Life is short and there is a lot out there to read. I am willing to read long pieces that reward me with good information or even just good writing, but I have little patience for writing that wastes my time.

[Richard Newman]

In the "old days" the cost to make a good image was much higher. Not only in money, but also in effort. And there was the uncertainty of results of any exposure until the film or plate was processed. This led to requiring more care in making each exposure. Now with instant feedback, exposures are easy, and multiple attempts to get what you want are common. Remember the pro shooter's dictum "the cheapest thing in your budget is film"? So the result is many shooters are sloppier in their technique without (usually) great penalty.
On the other hand, this facility can lead to interesting and worthwhile experimentation,

[Bill Wheeler]

About the few cents paid every time you release the shutter...times have changed. I just paid $42 for a 25-sheet box of 4x5 film. No complaints, really. I am happy to have the film.

[Ed Cornachio]

When?
When an 11 x 14 b&w print, still wet from a quick hypo fix, rested on an overturned tray in a darkroom sink, and a cotton swab, dampened with a dilute solution of potassium ferricyanide, stood ready to be applied to a small, highlighted crest of a Death Valley sand dune … a water bath at the ready to stop the chemical reduction when the emphasis looked “just right.” That’s when. That’s when the art of photography seemed more meaningful. When the magic birth of a print emerged from the tray of Dektol in the soft glow of an OA safelight. When a 5x7 Deardoff and a Highland one degree spot meter were the tools of choice. That’s when. When “The Negative” and “The Print” were essential reading, and “zones” meant more than just postal.
That’s when.

[Mike R]

Not having mastered Latin (even with 4 years of it in HS), I reach for my Latin-English dictionary when needed. Not where I choose to apply my efforts toward mastery.

Presently working towards mastery in walking a straight line. After 74 years, you would've thought something would stick.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

"You could almost—maybe not quite—cast the entire history of photo-tech as a relentless march toward greater and greater convenience."

Nope, not "almost". Convenience and ease-of-use is exactly what has propelled the capitalization and commercialization of photography nearly since 1839. Recall "You press the button and we do the rest"?

But while tech has largely eliminated the inconvenient chores of producing well-exposed, focused images it has done nothing to relieve the two far more important, and more inconvenient, chores of photography: deciding where to put the camera and when to open the shutter.

[Chris M]

"Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt. Nefas est."*

~David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest

*Literally, "they can kill you but they cannot eat you. It is a sin." Wallace translates it a bit more colorfully as, "They can kill you but the legalities of eating you are a bit dicier."

[Michael Perini]

I think Mr Byrnes is exactly right, I find myself doing it all the time for the exact reason he describes. But if the content is 'as expected' I almost always read to the end.
Re Convenience, it always wins in the marketplace. For photography I think we almost need another word for many of the pictures we take, because photography has gained additional usefulness in recent years.
BECAUSE the technical side of grabbing an image and sending it instantly has been made even easier than a phone call (you don't have to remember numers anymore, and no one even has to be there to accept it) Photography has become a convenient second language--a quick snap of the pipe that's leaking under your sink,--- is THIS the peanut butter you wanted or This one---and we all do it because it IS a great convenience and a new form of remote communication. This is a great thing.
On the next level up, snap shots family photos vacation pictures had been a traditional use but because it is easier to achieve excellent results photography's appeal has grown enormously and the 'instant shareability' has been a big part of that as well.
This is another great thing.
There has also been a boom in more serious and dedicated photography enthusiasts and generally this is a good thing as well.

But all this convenience in achieving a technically acceptable result, has resulted in perhaps less respect in general for Photography (with the Capital P)
We see newspapers firing photographers and handing out smartphones to reporters (which is also a sign of the speed of electronic delivery winning over the printed word)
Professional work disappearing because stock images can be had for pennies.
Photography's ubiquity and ease has made it harder to see it's value.
So at the higher end is where the dislocation is taking a toll.
And to your point I think it has become more difficult to earn respect for a craft where it has become easy to be competent .

The more 'casual photography' there is, the harder it become for some photography to be taken seriously.
There will always be those who do whatever it takes to produce obviously great work and we are all better for their efforts

Here is where I think T.O.P provides a valuable service because it is one of the few places that talks about expressive photography, and helps people engage with the valure and pleasure of owning and living with actual prints.
So thanks as usual TOP is a great idea and an antidote for what ails us.

[Alan Hill]

Photography too easy? Seek harder subjects!

[Bill Tyler]

Like Gato, I tried Google Translate. I'm wondering if this bit was stolen from a Roman predecessor to Sarah Palin.

Find fault with or for the learned, he may say to him, mentioned the name of, but afraid of, but amounted to a great hairstyle.

[Dave I.]

Visitatores potest mari posse renuntiare non licet. Et idem omnibus fuit. Chorus autem unumquodque perfectum est, quod primum corpus hominis non dicit. Xinwu docti quaerere oportet dicere poterit, nisi nomina, ut est timor magnus capillos. Facile perspicuum est hanc de suis bonis, aut in posterum longe a accumsan. UT problems gradu accurate tamquam delicatissimi vel quod non durabit.

Hmmm, Latin via Spanish, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Japanese, Finnish, German, English and back to Latin just doesn't look the same.

Thanks a lot, Google Translate!

[Nico]

Anything more convenient than George Eastman’s: "You Press The Button, We Do The Rest" (1888)?

the button…

[Mark Probst]

It seems to me you're advocating mastery for mastery's sake. I'm sure you could spend years perfecting your large format film loading to keep it plane, but how will that improve that your photography? Now that we've gotten out of the way with such technical distractions we have more time to spend on the actual craft of photography. Surely it is deep enough subject that, once the technicalities are taken care of, there is still a lot to learn, and to master?

[Sebastian]

"And did you know that in classical Latin, Cicero is not pronounced "SISS-uh-row," like Cicero, Illinois, but CHEE-chuh-row? True. Go to this link and click the loudspeaker icon under the right-hand word to hear it."

The Google voice is just plain silly (also wrong). It sounds Italian rather than Latin to me.

The pronunciation in classical Latin is with a "k": KEE-kuh-row. (More or less. See Wikipedia article if you'd like to decrypt the whole name with the help of some very complicated and very meaningful scientific symbols.)

Also, good luck with the salads. Definitely too few masters of those in the world.

[Andre Y]

Some people (like Stephen Mayes in that Wired interview mentioned in the comments of this or the other post) seem to assume that craft and immediacy are mutually exclusive.

But one can still usefully apply craft (ie. where to stand, where to point, and when to shoot) to our Instasnapchatgrams, just like taking a few moments to consider the 140 character Tweet so that we can communicate our thoughts with clarity.

[Dave in NM]

Reminds me of John Cleese's Latin lesson...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAfKFKBlZbM

[Chuck Holst]

Mike, don't you know it's not wise to believe everything you read (or hear) on the Internet? The classical Latin pronunciation of Cicero that I learned in high school, is KEE-keh-row. CHEE-chuh-row is the church Latin pronunciation. Similarly, Caesar is pronounced KI-sar, not SEE-zur, in classical Latin.

[Kevin Purcell]

The orange Horn Carrot came from the Long Orange Dutch carrot and was (to some extent) a political vegetable!

They were a result of a 17th century effort by Dutch vegetable growers who cultivated orange carrots to celebrate William of Orange and Dutch independence from Spain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/carrots-are-orange-for-an-entirely-political-reason/2011/09/09/gIQAfayiFK_blog.html

After forcing the reigning descendent of William of Orange to leave the Hague, the Patriots declared that orange was “the color of sedition...carrots sold with their roots too conspicuously showing were deemed provocative,” [Simon] Schama writes in his book, “Patriots and Liberators.”

Horn Carrot are also rather sweeter than other colors. I suspect that might have had some effect in spreading it outside of the Netherlands too.

The Dutch national soccer team play in orange. The fans always dress in orange (bit rarely as carrots more usually as lions). They cheer about "orange".

Wij houden van Oranje!

[Chris Grover]

Mike, I'd like to add two thoughts...
1. When I was learning Latin 30 years ago (I typed 20 years and then thought about it - that's scary!) I was taught that 'C' was hard as 'Cream' which would give us 'KiKero'..
Anyway, number 2:
2. I've spend the day with my 12 year old and his friend at an amusement park in Suffolk, England (Pleasurewood Hills). I've shot 3 rolls of Portra 400 on my Nikon F4E with the 135mm AF-DC and can't wait to see the photos. My concern (and the concern I have with my wedding photography) is the number of people who 'tutted' at me as I got in the way of their SmartPhone Videos... Not stills any more - videos. How do all of us as photographers (and videographers) deal with the dumming down of our content / output? My son is a pretty decent cyclist for q 15 year old and competes at national level, he also takes photos with me at the local level races. I give him my D700 and 80-200, set it to ISO 800 on 'A' at f4 and he gets stuff published in the local paper. I know this makes me part of the problem as much as the solution, but how much better can we be as 'professionals'?
Sorry bit of a rambling comment but there might be a couple of threads that you can pick out in the edit!
Chris

[hugh crawford]

legere inimicus reformidans mel ei, per et fabellas forensibus contentiones.

fearing the enemy's honey to the argument by the bar , and the stories about the strife

Some things never change!

[James Weekes]

Addressing your comment about how you were more careful when each shot cost a few pennies. I have a similar problem with volume. I spent so many years shooting rolls of 135-36 that, now, when I am out shooting, I run out of ideas/energy at about 108 shots, three rolls. Old habits die hard.

[xfmj]

'Twas brillig and the slithy toves...

[Carsten Schultz]

The idea of disguising the end of a text so that the reader does not know how near to it he is, has also been explored in one of the texts in “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.

[Mark Kinsman]

"Mike replies: What's a "Kardashian"? A kind of scarf?"

Its an option available for pickup trucks as in, "can I get it with the Kardashian option?"- also referred to as DRW (Dual Rear Wheels).

[Bob Goldstein]

About Chee-Chey-Roe, the Latin pronunciation on that Google page: that's how the name would be pronounced in contemporary Italian. I don't know how latin is supposed to be pronounced, but i suspect it might be different in each country.

[Andy F]

Manuel wrote:
How can there be any originality and uniqueness in something everybody does? And who will pay attention to what I do if photography is so widely used nowadays?

To which I ask, why does it matter?

The answer perhaps depends on why you practice photography: do you do it for the inherent pleasure of making art, or do you do it because you want to be known as an artist?

[Steve Jacob]

Vis Latin pronunciation:-

If you ever hear a Latin mass broadcast from the Vatican, you are likely to hear it spoken with an Italian accent, in which case Cicero would indeed be pronounced 'Cheecheroh'.

After all, it's just Olde Italian...closer to modern Italian than Anglo-Saxon was to modern English.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Art is less easily evaluated than craft. We've reached the point where it's fairly easy for anybody to attain adequate craft skills to make conventional images -- and the differences between serious practitioners are nearly all artistic choices. Which are a matter of opinion, and often some artists are not speaking to a broad audience, while still saying quite a lot to their audience. It's a very complicated landscape that you can't evaluate from general knowledge, I think.

[Miserere]

To get you started on your quest to clickbait, here's the first headline you should use:

This Photographer Took a Photo of a Homeless Man -- What the Man Did Next Will Amaze You

Let me know when you're done with that one; I've got plenty more.

[Glenn Allenspach]

Mike, will you be mastering Garden Salads, Seafood Salads, or Church Basement Jello Salads? As a former midwesterner, I'm sure you have at least a passing kowledge of the third option.

[Robert Harshman]

I could not disagree with the premise of this column more. While good exposure, focus and many other technical aspects have become easy for the most part. True mastery of photography will never be automated, there are simply too many variables.

Great photography is all about making decisions. From the shoot to post, decision, decision, decision.

While the technical aspects of modern digital imaging can be automatic now, the point of view, place to be, what to remove or include, how to capture/post is not.

I don't think it ever will be unless we get to a photo capture world where everything is recorded from all points of view all the time. And that might be coming. Then photography as we know it would be gone much like the buggy whip makers.

Robert

[Bruce McL]

"I'd be more than happy to put up click-bait if it would draw a huge audience. Occasionally I try. I don't really know how."

If you want to learn, just keep reading Petapixel. For an advanced course, read Buzzfeed or any website run by Gawker Media.

But don't forget, "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us."

Do you want to "be" clickbait?

[Alan Carmody]

As is the manner of internet reading that we all have learned, the only words I picked out, in about 10 seconds, were "Jerry Garcia", "Shakedown Street" and "sell out".

Jerry Garcia was being too modest. The Grateful dead were in fact the most financially successful touring band in rock until the mid 70s, and held their own against the Rolling Stones as moneymakers for a decade and a half after that.

This despite their avowed philosophy of being kind to their Deadhead fan entourage and encouraging the audience to make and exchange concert tapes. They were also known for taking care of their road crew, with good medical benefits, pensions plans and the like. In fact, articles were written on the management secrets of the Grateful Dead.

The internet gives us convenience and ease. What we do with it is completely different from what was envisaged originally. So also with imaging technology. There is no use looking to Ansel (rest his soul) for answers. Our future behavior is unknowable.

[Kefyn Moss]

I don't think mastery is something most casual photographers are even aware of, let alone pursuing. I definitely don't want to go back to the film days but I appreciate the things that it taught me and particularly the attitudes it promoted when every frame cost money. There's no reason why those same attitudes can't be applied to digital photography though. Just because every press of the shutter release is "free" (not really!) doesn't mean thought and decision can't be applied before pressing rather than after. I don't assess a body of work by how large it is but by its quality and although the two aren't mutually exclusive they rarely occur together. How many times have we heard someone stating (bragging) how many thousand photos that took per day or how many terabytes of files they have (and probably never access 95% of) and yet it still only leaves there work mediocre. Mastery is something that has to be ingrained by a process, so in this modern world of instant gratification, imbuing this into young people is the job of educators not manufacturers.

[Darlene]

I evidently instill fear and gratitude without intention while sharing gear and film stories from past jobs with current commercial photography students that have only known the digital age. Explaining why film clip tests were sometimes necessary brought about a few white faces recently.

[Robert Roaldi]

That correct pronunciation of Cicero is how an Italian would pronounce it today. In Italian (and Latin I guess) "ci" is pronounced like "Chi" in chicken. And the converse is also true. The antipasto "bruschetta" in Italian restaurants is pronounced "brus-ketta", where the "u" is like that in "rule". Most people get it wrong, saying "brus-shetta".

[Robert Fogt]

There seem to be endless internet discussions and debates over the very finest points of post processing, and I wonder to what extent this may reveal something of our need to keep photography safely under the mantle of 'difficult craft to master'. Since technical sufficiency has been made so convenient, dedication to complex PP seems to fill our need of mastery, to have become our new potassium ferricyanide.

[Eduardo Cervantes]

"It was actually great for discipline to have to pay a few cents every time you pushed the shutter button."
Great thought. Good enough for us old-timers to keep alive and to new photographers to know and learn to slow down a bit. Good enough to treasure it and that's what I'm going to do. Thanks Mike!

[Andy F]

Robert Hashman wrote:
I don't think it ever will be unless we get to a photo capture world where everything is recorded from all points of view all the time. And that might be coming. Then photography as we know it would be gone much like the buggy whip makers.

I dunno, if everything is recorded from all angles all the time, we just move our photography into this virtual world and capture images from it instead of going out into the real world. You could argue that's not really "photography" as such – it's more like taking screenshots – but the effective result is the same: you're making decisions about where to stand, where to point, and when to shoot, it's just that you also have the ability to rewind and try as many times as you want.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Is discipline highly desirable in art? If so, why? Seems like art should be about "vision", not "discipline".

Journalism switched to 35mm (long ago) because, in the end, consumers preferred the freer, more natural results it could produce. Sheet film was apparently forcing people to think too much about each shot, to the detriment of the shots.

[John F. Opie]

Cardassians...DS 9 has Cardassians...not Kardashians. Oy...

[Adam Richardson]

"This main tilted the viewfinder on his camera. You won't believe what happened next!"
There I fixed the headline for you :-)

I highly recommend the movie "It Might Get Loud", which features guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. Jack White has the best bits in it, a lot of which are focused on how he intentionally makes his life hard as a musician in order to push his creativity and focus (playing with a crappy instrument, moving gear to inconvenient positions on the stage, putting many constraints on himself, etc.). I think it's available on Netflix, probably Amazon too.

By the way, it's gangling, off-topic, erudite articles and comments like these that make TOP such a wonderful daily read!

[Ronald Frakes]

Was going to suggest that there ARE "Lorem ipsum" photographs, but then realized that the entire direction of the comments is about that.

Or, in short: "No pain, minimal art".
Must ask my sister, a Latin scholar, to xlate that for me.

[Andrew Sharpe]

A debater. I want to be a Master Debater. God knows there's enough of those in photography already, but what the heck.

[Gary Nylander]

David Brown's comment at the end of the "featured" part of this blog post is one of the best quotes I have read in a while...

"Taking pictures is easier than ever. Making good photographs is as hard as it ever was."

Thank-you David.