Photography, then and now

Since almost everyone is a photographer nowadays, I best put in a disclaimer: this is totally personal opinion and not in any way meant to offend anyone in particular. Read the blog readme for the type of people I encouraged not to read my blog.

When I was still actively pursuing photography as my hobby many, many years ago, the emphasis was in taking the photo.

You know, the composition, the perspective, the lighting consideration, the depth of field, the right aperture and shutter speed selection, the foreground interest, the lead in, checking to make sure no unwanted elements that could spoil the photo, that sort of things.

Ultimately, the aim is to capture faithfully what is actually there, either a beautiful scene, or some normal object that we have the vision to turn into a nice photograph.

The skill used to be in knowing how to handle the different lighting, motion, and whatever else actual conditions at that moment. The sense of achievement comes from that one photograph that captured the image as we seen it in real life, so that we can share that beautiful scene, or that vision that we successfully realised.

Probably worth mentioning that when I was still active in photography, it's still the film era. At that time, the top of the end digital SLR that normal people couldn't afford even if we sold our kidney, had 10 Megapixels, and normal point and shoot digital camera had 3 Megapixels.

Fast forward to nowadays, as I do not own a digital SLR, and had pretty much stopped doing 'serious' photography, my view is based on the images seen online.

What I noticed is that nowadays, taking a good photo is relatively easy, the camera does most of the thinking, correcting, and even 'enhancement' for you.

The emphasis is no longer in the taking process, since that part has largely been trivialised, but on the postprocessing of the image.

It's no longer about faithfully reproducing a scene, but about generating a vision through software postprocessing. It no longer matters much if the original real scene image was taken poorly, as long as one has the skill in the editing software.

The original photo serves just as a base for the editing, addition, and modification. The final image can look very different to the original photo, some so unrealistic that they can never naturally be seen in real life, but yet has become the norm that people accept as nice 'photograph'.

It's no longer about mastering light manipulation, but instead mastering image manipulation. I like to think there is a difference between a photographer and an image editor.

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