Boy, it sure is around here. I was just looking at Craigslist at photo gear. Craigslist is full of folks who are advertising themselves as "pro" and trying to find paying clients for work, but whose portfolio is composed primarily of snapshots that are poorly composed, poorly lit, poorly timed, poorly posed, and look like they were done with early cell phones.
That's absolutely true, Bill. That "P" mode is why you can "shoot like a pro" with a Canon Rebel.
Well, yes. That and the proliferation of computers that allow folks to store and post-process their own images. In the film days in order to distribute your images, there was an investment; not only in film, but in processing and printing costs plus the time involved. If you made poor images, you spent a lot of time, effort, and money just trying to bring your poor images to market. If they didn't sell, you couldn't afford to keep it up for very long. You either improved your ability to make images or you got out.
Today, there's no investment past buying the camera. They already have a computer, Gimp is free, and you can store a huge number of images for free online. The investment in the images, and subsequently the necessity of improving the skill level has disappeared. The "I have a digital camera, so I can do that too" factor is very high. The skill level of really talented and experienced photographers is discounted. The public is now seeing so much poor-quality imaging that all images are devalued.
So, while digital has truly democratized imaging, it's also brought imaging down to the lowest common denominator. The sheer volume of images is now so large that none of them are valuable and good images are buried under an avalanche of mediocre and worse.
It's a sad state of affairs.
