So…this was a pain. Did it work as imagined? No. Was it super fun? Also no. BUT I enjoyed going for it to see if this weird idea could work. Turns out, it kind of can, but would take far more work and customizations to get it just right. Anyway, hope you enjoy the video! (You can peep some of the photos below)
How to be Different
In 2023, we’re often told to “stay in our lane”. And I understand why, it’s a heck of a lot easier to communicate if we are only communicating simple ideas to a select group of people rather than a lot of ideas to a lot of people. From a marketing or brand awareness standpoint, that’s really good advice.
It’s easier to make an impact if you are making one type of thing.
From a consumption standpoint, however, staying in one lane is death.
It’s a funny phenomenon, I see a lot of photographers do the opposite of this: They create a lot of different things and are generalists, but they only consume photography-related content. It should be totally flipped around- It’s hard to be a good photographer if all you know is photography. It’s actually easier to be creative when you get your inspiration and ideas from all over the place.
It’s taken me a long time to become focused with what I create, mostly because I’ve been really good at the “consuming a lot of things in a lot of different industries thing”. I listen to podcasts, read books, watch movies and more about TONS of different things. In fact, I’ve been consuming a lot of photography related content lately and that’s super weird for me. I don’t feel super connected to that world, despite being a photographer for over a decade now.
I like consuming photography-related stuff, because, well, I like photography and have a photography-related podcast, but it feels a little indulgent, I’m not going to lie. I feel a little guilty for it. It feels like junk food a little bit. Same with talking about cameras or technology or whatever else- It’s fun, but it’s all kind of a distraction from the point of all this.
As an example: I think my favorite “photo-book” is the Momofuku Cookbook. It’s not a photo-book per say, (although I suppose cook books can be considered that sometimes) but it has many photos in the book that are a total reinvention of food photography. Food photography was always about spraying water on lettuce to create perfect droplets or rubbing lard on a steak to make it shiny, but in the Momofuku Cookbook, the photos are gritty and cinematic. They look like they were shot on film and they tell a story. They aren’t just perfect arranged photos of food.
I love photo books as much as the next guy, but now I want to gather a collection of photo books that aren’t explicitly photo books, but are examples of interesting ways to tell stories with images.
One can always tell when a photographer isn’t getting out of the photography world enough: They are often insecure about their standing in or violating unspoken rules of the photography community. That’s a tough place to be, because then, your work will only be aimed at other photographers rather than reaching other people. This is another reason I’m on the flip side of this discussion, because I maybe haven’t invested enough in the photography community and I’m really only interested in making work aimed at either non-photographers or for myself quite honestly. This podcast is kind of a reflection of that: I’m not always coloring in the lines of the photography world.
I’m always really interested in making something unique and interesting. Making something “different” has kind of been my quest over my photography career. In order to make something interesting and different, we have to consume interesting and different things. We have to listen to the world around us.
There’s this movie, and maybe you’ve seen it, but probably not. It’s not a great movie, but it lays out a simple premise of creativity that I enjoy. It’s called We Are Your Friends. It’s a Zach Efron movie where he plays an aspiring DJ. He meets and becomes friends with a more famous DJ who coaches him on how to find his voice. And the movie boils that down in a really insightful way in my opinion: There’s a scene where Zach Efron plays one of his tracks, which sounds like cookie cutter DJ music I guess. It’s all sounds from his DJ computer software. The famous DJ, played by Wes Bentley (that guy from Yellowstone) tells him to try and use sounds from the real world instead of all the sounds that every other DJ is using.
I don’t know if that’s an accurate depiction of DJs or not, or if DJs go around recording the sounds of nail guns and quarters spinning in order to integrate them into their music. The overall message is saying that we need to create something “honest” and something that is actually a part of who we are, and then maybe it’ll hit and reach a larger audience.
Recently, I talked about what I believe the secret to success is: Focus on making something really good and being kind to people. I think the sub-secret under “making something good” is to consume the world around us, not just the photography world. The only way to be unique is to consume unique stuff, and to find inspiration in weird places. If we just make work for other photographers, we’ll never reach that next level creatively.
All this talk about telling your story or making something that is honest about who you are doesn’t mean much if who you are is limited by what you’re taking in. You are what you eat. If all we do is watch photographers on Youtube, then maybe we can one day be a really good Youtube photographer, but that’s kind of it. In order to be more, we have to explore more.
Work Camera, Play Camera
When I started in photography, it was all I could do to afford equipment.
My first camera, a Nikon D3000, was a Christmas gift, but after that I was pretty much on my own. It basically use to take me cleaning out my own bank account to get a new camera.
In Spring of 2014, two months before I was getting married, I made the dumb decision to buy a Nikon D800, which was an absolute beast of a machine. This camera had 36 megapixels (I think the camera I was using at the time had half that), and it was full-frame. (For those uninitiated in these terms, “full-frame” basically just means the sensor the same size of a 35mm film negative. A crop sensor is smaller than a 35mm negative. Basically a full-frame sensor captures more data.)
The part of buying this camera that freaked me out was that it was $2600. I had never really spent money like that before. (Now this is basically standard or a really good deal for a modern day camera equivalent to the D800) I did one of those Best Buy no interest for 18 month deals to purchase it, so this was also the first time I had taken a financial risk of any sort. This camera now had the job of paying for itself in 18 months or less, otherwise I’d be slammed with all that built up interest.
I’d love to give you a more action-packed story, but I paid it off in time with like six months to spare or something like that.
5 years later, I upgraded to the Nikon D850. I think that one was like $3600 or something crazy. This one had 45 megapixels I believe, and was much faster than the D800. The Nikon D850 may to this day be my favorite camera I ever owned. But after 4 years of heavy use, it was time to move on. The shutter count was getting crazy high and in all these years I never really had a backup camera. If I were to, say, drive to Amarillo, TX with a friend and my shutter decided to give out while I was on a long desolate stretch of road on the Oklahoma/TX border, I would have been screwed.
So I bit the bullet and switched to mirrorless. I got the Sony A7IV and a couple Tamron lenses. Camera technology has come so far over the years that really, a powerhouse like the Nikon D850 was overkill- between AI editing tools and all this new software, I can take a 20 megapixel image from the 1 inch sensor of a drone and print it 60x40 (in fact, I do it all the time). So, I saved about $1000 and downgraded a bit with this Sony camera. It has 33 megapixels (which is still a lot).
I know I have some non-photographer listeners to this podcast who are in it for when I get more philosophical, so forgive all the nitty gritty of this episode. I’m getting to a point, don’t worry.
The Sony is a perfect camera. It just works, and works really well. It focuses super fast, it’s small and light, and it takes fantastic images. But, quite honestly, it’s super boring. It’s a workhorse. I love it because I can rely on it to get the job done.
In the past, my Nikon was my only camera (other than some film cameras I used from time to time), so it was my work AND play camera. I’d use it for family events and to just document life. But back then there wasn’t really a line between work and play that I paid attention to. I lived as if work and play were the same thing, because I love photography and it was an important part of my life.
But that was my 20s, and in your 20s, work and play can be the same thing. If there’s any time to consume your life with an irresponsible lifestyle like that, it’s your 20s.
I think the Sony camera being boring has nothing to do with how camera technology had changed, it’s me that changed. If I got a Nikon D850 today, I’d probably feel the same thing.
I turned my life into this endless grind for a while where I would take photos for work and life, and then come home, import the RAW files, and edit them for hours. There became no difference between work and life. They were both, well, work. I was putting equal work into working on the photos I had taken for fun, and the photos I had taken for a client. There was no end to it.
Here’s the thing, I love photography. I’m never going to stop loving it. In order to not burn out, I figured out a solution for myself: I need 2 cameras, a work camera, and a play camera.
The work camera has basic requirements in order to fill the needs of you know…work stuff. The play camera, however, needs to be fun, allow me to be creative, I’d like it to be really small and pocketable if possible, and it needs to feel completely different from a work camera.
Enter my Fujifilm X-E4. It’s a tiny little camera with a lot of power, but it fulfills all those requirements. It has built in film simulations, so I can make my photos look like film “in-camera” rather than spending hours editing the images. Unlike the Sony, it has my beloved double exposure feature so I can get back to one of my favorite techniques. Sometimes I’ll take photos on it for weeks before unloading the card, but it doesn’t matter. There are no strings on this camera.
Years ago, I couldn’t have really justified the idea of owning two cameras. Now, I have to own two cameras to stay sane.
If you’re a photographer like me and are absolutely addicted, meaning you can’t just limit your photography habit to client work, I think you need 2 cameras: a work camera and a play camera. Creating images for fun with the same workflow as the one you use for work isn’t healthy for a long stretch of time, at least, it hasn’t been for me. Besides, having a totally different camera, one that’s more limited, I think helps us be more creative overall. My Sony has almost no major limits, so it just doesn’t stimulate creativity like the Fujifilm camera does. Heck, using your phone as a “play” camera is great too.
Cameras are just so good now that camera tech is boring. Congrats, we did it guys. All the complaining in 2009-2014 about how “I love this camera but it would be cool if it had X feature” is kind of over. I’m sure there’s more tech breakthroughs coming down the pipeline, but as far as most photography work is concerned, we have everything we could ever want.
So now, in our free time, we have to seek out some limits in order to stay creative I think. Whether it’s a smaller Digital camera, or a phone or getting into film, I think it never hurts to to challenge ourselves in different ways. It can only make us better at what we do.
Photography Business
Ah yes, the personal brand. We all want one, but only a select few can pull them off. The question is: Why do we want one?
The failures of personal brands are pretty simple in my mind: When it becomes too much about a person’s own fulfillment rather than bringing value to others, is when it doesn’t really work. This is 100% the problem with many photographers: many people who I’ve talked to or seen want to become a photographer are doing it for their own personal lifestyle. They see a life they want to have, and that’s why they want to be a freelance photographer or whatever, rather than what they should do which is to become a photographer because you have value to offer an audience or customer base.
If you want to be a photographer for a business, it’s no different from any other business: Do it in order to solve a problem. But, because of the culture around personal brands and photographers, that is often not the motivation to start a photography business. I’ll admit, it wasn’t mine. I wanted the lifestyle of creating because I liked how it felt, but that’s really hard to sell to people. Because it’s not for anyone but me.
Do we complain about social media engagement dropping because we are trying to solve a problem and we can’t help our audience as well, or are we complaining because we just aren’t getting that feeling of personal success and attention like we used to? Is it about us, or is it about others?
The algorithm loves educational content. Anytime I post a reel or TikTok with me talking to the camera about some tip or trick, it always does way better than posting a picture of my own art. Call it depressing, but validation of a beautiful landscape shot is for me. A useful tip being shared is for others. It’s seems pretty simple to me. I believe it’s not hard to grow a following if we are truly dedicated to providing a service or value to others. The reason we see so much complaining is just because there are a metric crap ton of people not providing anything, but want attention for it.
Photography businesses that aren’t doing well are often failing for this reason, no doubt in my mind. They aren’t serving anyone anything. Whether their audience just doesn’t exist, or they aren’t providing value. A selfish business can’t last. And, quite honestly, it shouldn’t last.
And maybe that’s harsh. But I’ve been doing this for nearly 14 years now, and I can trace back a lot of my failures to this basic problem. I succeed when I am giving people something they want, and I fail when I’m not giving them anything or I’m trying to give something they don’t really want.
Photographers are photographers. Photographers aren’t often business people. Photographers get into photography because they like photography. There’s nothing wrong with that, but our like of photography isn’t sellable on it’s own. Our passion isn’t enough to make a business profitable. In fact, and this may be a little depressing, but our passion for photography (or whatever art form) can often be an impediment to a profitable or successful business. I’m not saying it always is, but it often very much is. Artists and photographers have a couple options here: team up with someone who is really good and passionate about business, or become really passionate about business yourself.
Here’s an example of how photographers often fail: Buying photography equipment. In the modern day, it’s crazy how much you can get away with with almost no gear at all. Of course, some genres of photography require a lot of gear, but I, in all my years of this, have never required more than 2 or 3 lenses and a flash or two just in case of emergency. That’s it. You can shoot weddings, real estate, lifestyle, product, with only what’s in my Incase Sling Bag. (Which only fits two lenses other than what’s on my camera, a flash, and then some other tiny knick knacks.)
From a business perspective, a photographer should spend as little as possible on the tools themselves. Get great tools to make the job easier, but photographers often go overboard on that. From a photographer perspective, you should be buying new gear all the time. But let’s be real, unless you’re really hard on your equipment, you don’t even need to buy a new camera body any more frequently than every 5 years.
Gear is exciting. I get that. But it’s often a stumbling block to photographers because there are so many things worth investing in in business. Like outsourcing or marketing or building community with other business owners. Save your money on gear and spend it on actually growing the business, because that will help you serve those you are trying to serve more effectively.
Hobbyists make the work for themselves, Pros make it for others.
Using AI to Edit Your Photos
I for one, welcome our AI overlords.
At the beginning of this podcast, I talked about AI Art in relation to how we think about a successful image. But, AI has touched photography in so many different ways than just with AI generated artwork.
Well, like a T-1000, we have welcomed AI in all its forms into our hearts and minds.
When I would work in the darkroom in college, in order to make a print, I had to put a negative in an enlarger which projected a light through my negative on to a light sensitive piece of paper. If I wanted to dodge or burn a spot on the photo, I had to literally cover up parts of the image in order to keep the projected light from exposing the entire photograph equally. This took time, I don’t remember how long for each image, but making 10 prints for a class assignment took a lot of work.
There were a lot of manual methods with which to edit an image in the darkroom, whether it was altering developing time by pushing or pulling or dodging and burning. My friend Matt Quillian would experiment in greater ways by drawing on his printed work or using experimental papers and methods. No matter what you do in the darkroom, you actually have to do it.
Then when I started moving into Photoshop, I realized all of the terms we used in the darkroom were there, just as clickable icons who’s algorithm simulated said effect. Obviously, this added tons of functionality and ease to photography, which has helped bring it to the mainstream. Photoshop started this, but honestly, there’s tons of photographers now (professional ones even) that have no idea how to use Photoshop, because editing tools got even more simple in Lightroom and…iPhone and iPad apps. It’s actually wild, if you start asking around in the photographer community, you’ll find that the ability to use Photoshop is rarer than you’d believe.
With many editing their work with sliders, I believed we had reached the ultimate simplification of photo editing.
But then, like Skynet coming online, photography YouTubers were suddenly getting paid to make videos about this new software called Luminar.
Luminar is an AI photo editor. All that time you spent in Photoshop healing out power lines is no longer necessary. Photoshop and Lightroom simplified photo editing, but somehow, companies have found a way to simplify it even further. And better than Adobe’s suite in some cases. What’s cool about Luminar to me is that it knows the difference between images, it doesn’t just slap on the same filter and edits to each one, which I suppose is what makes it true AI. I don’t understand the voodoo that allows it to work the way it does, but it’s pretty amazing.
Do you have a low res image that you want to print or clean up? AI is really good at that now. Gigapixel AI somehow can replace the data in an image and take your low res scan of a family photo and make it look clean and new. All with just a click.
I feel like the idea of AI editing tools kind of snuck up on us. Maybe we were too distracted with COVID to notice what was going on, but suddenly, we are living through a similar shift in technology that photographers probably felt when Photoshop started replacing darkrooms. And of course, there’s pushback. There’s purists that believe Photoshop is the only “correct” way to actually create a great image.
But Photoshop was new too. It’s funny, we always convince ourselves that there’s a right and wrong way to do things. A pure way that has always been. But Photoshop hasn’t always been, it has just hung around for a whole generation. But the next generation of photographers don’t necessarily need it anymore. Many don’t even use adobe products. There are many photographers that send their images straight to their phone from their cameras and just use VSCO or an iPhone app to tweak them. And these people sometimes have more followers than you or I. There is no right way. There’s only good images. It doesn’t matter how we get there.
Throughout my photography career, I always heard photographers claim that others were “cheating” if they were taking editing shortcuts or not taking the time to laboriously heal out sensor dust or something. “Cheating” in photography doesn’t exist.
I have a photographer friend, and I’m not going to call her out, but I know for a fact she only edits her photos from her Canon EOS R…with her phone. And people pay her to take photos for them all the time. She’s going to have to upgrade soon in order to make her workflow more convenient, but she’s made it very far with the bare minimum tools. And the market, aka her clients, don’t know the difference.
I find myself using these AI tools more and more. It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to get rid of power lines, because I don’t need to anymore. It used to be painstaking work to put a “fake sky” in an image because you’d have to contend with the blending of all the tree branches, but now you can click a button and pick your sky within seconds.
This is only going to get easier and easier. In my episode about how I believe 2016 is the year that everything changed, I posit that’s the year that began the impossibility of hiding behind our technology. Knowing how to use Photoshop is a cool skill, but unless you’re specifically a photo retoucher by trade, knowledge in Photoshop isn’t a way to give you a leg up on the competition. Being able to do things “manually” is valuable in its own way, but it doesn’t automatically give us a license that says we are better than a photographer who edits purely on VSCO.
Maybe I’m projecting, but I’ve always had some guilt when using editing tools that make the job easier. Could be something instilled in us by all the Nikon Dads out there though. But we don’t have to feel this guilt. If the images are good, then it doesn’t really matter if we did it the hard way or not. Doing things the hard way only effects us, and we’re not going to win any competitions with it.
I remember going to a wedding in 2011 where the photographer touted that he never used Photoshop on his images. (I think he was just delivering photos straight out of camera maybe? I’m not sure what he meant by that) Now you hear the same types of photographers say they are really good at photoshop as a point of pride, and they would never sink to using AI or a mobile editing tool. Even Photoshop is adding more AI features to try and stay afloat during the rising tide of the machines. So editing tools are now mixing together in one big soup, it’s kind of ridiculous to draw a line between them anymore. There’s a million ways to make your images look good, and now, it’s just about preference.
And truthfully, I think I like this future better than the one where technology was the gatekeeper of photography, because now, it’s all about great images and the stories we tell.
So, I would argue that in 2022, photography has never been more “pure”.
Bonus: What "Photography is Dead" is all about
Since we’re talking websites and about pages this week, I decided to do a little exercise and write and “about” for this podcast. So here goes:
Photography is Dead is an episodic podcast about the photography world.
Why did I start this podcast?
I’ve been obsessed with photography since 2009 and I can tell you that a lot has changed over that short period. Since then, Instagram showed up, mirrorless cameras were invented, film photography started coming back, and “photographers” became more common. Affordable cameras and social media is really what brought photography to the mainstream, and the market saturation of photographers is what has broadened the definition of photographer into a million little sub-categories.
I think for so long, photographers took this whole “Everyone is a photographer” as a bad thing, but increasingly I started to see it as a really good thing. It is what has allowed photographers to have the freedom to create their own lanes: If there weren’t enough wedding photographers, if you owned a camera, you’d probably feel a ton of demand for weddings. You may feel pulled in that direction as you look longingly at, I don’t know, pet photography or whatever you’d rather do.
There’s plenty of wedding photographers. Plenty of real estate photographers. Plenty of photographers in those jobs that I don’t really want to do, which is perfect, because that means…I don’t have to do those things.
And if I did….there’s so much room to focus your market: Maybe you only do super high end listings. Maybe you only do certain types of weddings. We are able to differentiate in a way that the market couldn’t really bare 13 years ago.
The more photographers there are, the more creative and interesting everything gets, and yet, we see market saturation as a bad thing.
There’s plenty for everyone, the trick is finding where we fit and leaning into our particular strengths.
This warped view of “too much competition” leads us to the warped place where we see our differences as weaknesses, rather than strengths. When I decided to go full time, I thought, well, all my knowledge about the print world is unmarketable in South Carolina, no one’s really doing that around here. Oh. Wait. No one is really doing that around here.
I feel like just in the past couple years, everyone who works for themselves or has a side-hustle has had to become a content creator of some kind, which creates its own kind of demand. I think if you can create images, edit video, make music, or have a skill that helps people brand themselves well, you are in demand right now. Yeah there are a ton of images in the world, more than ever, but the world needs more images, more than ever. It’s crazy how much people need images right now.
I’m using Photography is Dead to try and capture the changing world of photography, while also using it to highlight the positives in what many photographers see as negative. In 2022, we can be as weird and unique as we want to be, in fact, the weirder the better. It may take patience and a lot of honing, but I believe there’s so much opportunity out there in the photography world that hasn’t been tapped into yet. A lot has happened in a decade, and a decade is a pretty short period of time.
Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography!
Nikon Dad
I’m a Nikon dad.
Yes, I’m actually a dad and I own a Nikon Camera (actually a few), but the dad part really has nothing to do with the term “Nikon dad”
It’s more of a lifestyle, a type of person, a state of mind.
It’s not really my fault either: much like Mowgli in the Jungle Book being raised by wolves, I was raised by other Nikon dads.
So what is a Nikon dad?
A Nikon dad is a photography enthusiast, someone who really cares about the details. Someone who believes there’s a right way to be a photographer. Someone who owns khaki pants and a selection of golf shirts. Someone who lauds Nikon as the only proper camera, and looks down upon all the other brands as inferior.
Nikon dads are associated heavily with “pixel peepers” defined on Wiktionary as “a person who carefully scrutinizes a magnified digital photograph in order to evaluate resolution and image quality”
I’m currently in recovery. (To be fair, I don’t own any golf shirts anymore. I left that lifestyle behind when I was old enough to start paying my own rent)
My first DSLR camera was a Nikon D3000, and since then I’ve owned a Nikon D200, a D7000, a D800, and just recently retired from a Nikon D850. While they are the Dell PCs of the camera world, the D800 series especially has been perfect for my main line of work. When shooting images to make large prints I didn’t have to worry about anything. These cameras are so powerful and fulfill every need. I still believe the Nikon D850 is competitive to any mirrorless camera on the market today.
I actually switched to Sony earlier this year, although I’m starting to realize it’s the camera brand of the next generation of Nikon dads. (Especially since I’m pretty sure Nikon uses Sony sensors in their cameras now) But because I’ve been using such a high resolution camera I even downgraded a bit from 45 megapixels on my D850 to 33 on my new Sony A7IV.
In 2009, owning a Nikon was cool. Everyone owned one. They were the most affordable way to get a “professional” camera at the time. Now, Nikon really has a bad reputation, but not because of the camera itself which is just as good if not better than other cameras on the market, but largely because of the people that tend to like them.
I think the type of person that is passionate about Nikon is the type of person that became a photographer back when photography was still pretty unaccessible. Nikon was always the best choice for years and years. It was the camera back in the film days. One of the coolest things about Nikon cameras is that you can use their vintage film lenses on their newer DSLRs and vice versa. Nikon has a legacy unlike any other brand.
But you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Pixel peepers, as they are known, are the most obnoxious people on the photography internet for a reason: They miss the point of photography. Humans are drawn to images based on emotion and story, not whether the reds and blues in an image are totally correct. In fact, most people couldn’t care less about a photo being “correct”.
“Movie premiere, Hollywood” 1955 is a photo by Robert Frank is a photo of a woman in a crowd, but the subject is out of focus and the crowd behind her is in focus. How you feel about this photo I think determines where you land on the Nikon dad meter. I used to hate it, because it’s technically not great.
But that’s not the point.
I’ve grown and matured, and I’ve found myself chasing scenes much like this one. I’d rather take a photo like this than a technically perfect image of recorded data. I’d rather convey some type of emotion or feeling than show you a picture of a sunset on a perfect landscape.
Here’s the funny part: for the past few months, I’ve only found myself carrying around my Fujifilm X-E4.
What??? It’s not even full-frame. It’s a tiny, basically point and shoot camera, and that’s all I want. The Fujifilm personality is probably the opposite of a Nikon dad in almost every way: creative, fun, and doesn’t own khaki pants OR a golf shirt.
We recently had a hurricane graze our area and it brought some incredible sunsets.
I didn’t take a photo of a single one.
That’s how I know I’m getting better.
But in all seriousness, I don’t want to play stereotypes here. There are plenty of Nikon people who have emotions and an artistic eye. But, if you’re a camera person or photographer, you probably know exactly what I mean when I say “Nikon dad”.
I’m pretty squarely a hybrid photographer now more than ever. I shoot digital, now on a Sony and a Fujifilm (ok ok and my Nikon D850 still sometimes) AND I shoot film. On my desk right now I have my Sony A7IV, a Nikon N65 35mm film camera, a Nikkormat FT2, and a Nikon L35AF and a selection of old and new lenses.
The perfection of even my Sony camera has made me kind of lose interest in a super powerful digital camera. If I’m assigned to shoot an image or I just need “the shot” I grab my Sony because I know I’m covered. But if I want to create memorable images that are really fun to shoot, I want some sort of limitations to work around.
Cameras now have everything. These gear videos on Youtube comparing sharpness of old and new models are so silly now because they almost have no difference. We are in the boring, iterative part of camera technology. No new ground is bring broken. Everything is amazing.
Which means, if anything is important in 2022, it’s the images.
I think Twitter has a really amazing photography community, better than Instagram at this point, and I’m seeing incredible, visionary images taken on iPhones!
It’s not the camera you have, it’s what you do with it that defines you.
What I’m ultimately saying is that I believe we have evolved past technical perfection. I believe images whose goal is “correctness” has become noise that blends in with everything else. What stands out now, is character, vision, and story.
And honestly, I hope to be able to be a photographer like that one day.