... While the number of pictures in some venues have decreased, the number of pictures we are exposed to has increased greatly. Sadly, in many, many fields, not just photography, volume up - overall quality down. ...
I suggest the ratio of high-quality work to low-quality work is a constant that depends primarily on human behavior.
“
Anyone can take pictures. What’s difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That’s really where the work of the artist begins” – Lewis Baltz
It is human to avoid difficult work.
The difference is: until the internet, there was no way to display low-quality work to a large audience. In other words, professional editing (image selection,
not rendering) once eliminated large volumes of mediocre work. On-line there is no editing. We see everything. To make matters worse, many photographers spend almost no time on image selection and staging. This needlessly dilutes the impact of the small number of interesting images they post.
... Why, in many cases, has it been replaced by shooting a burst of digital frames without thinking - just praying that something interesting will happen while you have the shutter button pressed down. You know who does that? Me. And it scares the hell out of me.
...
Don't do that. This is extremely simple. Nothing stands in your way to work slowly, thoughtfully and deliberately.
Except for action photography, slow, thoughtful photography offers a potential advantage thoughtless over spray and pray techniques. The primary impact is on how interesting the final results happen to be.[1]
A secondary advantage is post-production requires a lot less time spent on image selection. This means more time is available for image rendering and staging. A big, yet unrecognized, disadvantage of working quickly without thoughtfulness is very little time and effort is spent on how to see better. Even if a photographer is blessed with a natural good eye, it takes time and reflection to make full use of that talent.
There is nothing whatsoever about digital photography that requires one to work with less thought, care and intent.
1. What make a photograph interesting is highly subjective. I'm comfortable with Wingorand's definition - "
Every photograph is a battle of form versus content. The good ones are on the border of failure." and "
It’s got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that’s what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not."
Here are just a some other quotes that mean something to me.
“If you want to make photographs, all you do is point the camera at whatever you wish; click the shutter whenever you want. If you want to judge a good photograph, ask yourself: Is life like that? The answer must be yes and no, but
mostly yes.”-Charles Hebutt
To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. - Elliott Erwitt
Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual. - Edward Weston
To equate my painting with symbolism, conscious or unconscious, is to ignore its true nature. People are quite willing to use objects without looking for any symbolic intention in them, but when they look at paintings, they can't find any use for them. So they hunt around for a meaning to get themselves out of the quandary, and because they don't understand what they are supposed to think when they confront the painting.They want something to lean on, so they can be comfortable. They want something secure to hang on to, so they can save themselves from the void. People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking "what does this mean?" they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things." —Rene Magritte
The pictures reveal a persistent verdancy that is unexpected. How could anyone explain the bird in the defoliated orchard, the suddenly clear day on a quiet road, or the astonishing silhouette of a eucalyptus in smog - Robert Adams
