The Changing Landscape of Professional Photography

Forty years ago nobody would buy a Brownie box camera and think to offer their services as a professional photographer. Around thirty years ago Kodak and a couple other manufacturers came out with "Instamatic" cameras. Still, no one would think that with an Instamatic camera they were equipped to offer professional photography services.

As camera technology progressed, more and more "bells and whistles" got added to the improving models of what then became known as "point and shoot" cameras. Still, nobody with just a point and shoot camera would consider himself or herself a professional photographer.

You see, back in the days before the advent of digital cameras, film was the medium for recording photographs. And before the invention of Instamatic and point and shoot cameras, you had to actually know how to use the controls on a camera in order to properly expose the film to make a photograph.

Instamatic and later point and shoot cameras enabled millions of people to make snapshots and record their lives and those of their families and friends. Professional cameras with changeable lenses and aperture and shutter speed controls continued to be the tools of professional photographers and serious amateurs.

Point and shoot cameras designed for hobbyists proliferated and millions of people began to enjoy the hobby of photography. And certainly many got to be pretty good at composing and creating photographs with them. But even if all their friends told them what great photographs they made, do you think a person with a point and shoot camera would have the gumption to claim to be a professional and offer their services for hire? I think not.

Now days with all the available digital SLR cameras geared to the hobbyist consumer with a price tag that is within the reach of many hobbyists, one cannot tell by looking at the camera whether the user knows what they are doing or not! Why not? Because all the DSLRs have Program modes of operation that enable the user to use them just the same as a point and shoot camera.

The advances of digital photography have been absolutely wonderful! Now days a camera is a complex computer with a lens, and most people with a little practice can make some pretty good photographs with them. Certainly the optics for modern DSLRs are vastly improved over the point and shoot optics of yesteryear.

The downside of all this progress is that more and more hobbyists with nice DSLRs are marketing themselves as professional photographers, and charging for their services without knowing anything about photography except how to frame a picture and press the shutter release. As a result many people are being duped into hiring amateurs, and are buying amateur quality photographs because they think they are getting a good deal because the price is low. And because they don't know how to separate the amateurs from the pros when choosing a photographer to do a job for them, whether it be portraiture or commercial photography.

Caveat emptor...Let the consumer beware!

About the author: Stan P. Cox II runs a Portrait and Commercial photography studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, and has been a professional Hawaii photographer specializing in portraiture for over 30 years. His web address is: http://www.paramountphotography.com This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Cameras For Landscape Photography

I have, quite literally, seen wonderful landscape photographs that were taken with a cookie tin. Yup, a cookie tin, with a pinhole in the front and photographic paper inside.

It can be done, but my goodness, it's hard to pull off. That's one reason why people pay for expensive cameras.

Of course that rather begs the question of which features are worth paying for when you buy a camera. In my opinion, the biggest single improvement you can make on the cookie tin is a light meter. Fortunately, you'd have a hard time finding a camera that doesn't have a built in light meter these days. After that, it gets more complicated.

One important factor is weight.

Plate cameras give superb results if you know how to use them, but there's no denying that they're heavy - some weigh 10 kg/22 lb. And then there's the weight of the plate holders and plates themselves. Plus, it's too heavy to hand-hold, so you'll need a hefty tripod for sure. That's a lot to carry up a mountain.

On the other hand, when used with a slow film, they give you the equivalent of 960 M pixels. That's 80 times as many as a modern 12 Mpixel DSLR.

A compact camera is very light and easy to carry. This is a major advantage on a long hike, especially if you're more enthusiastic than fit (like me!). And you can certainly take a great photo with one - most of the time. But boy are the other times frustrating!

Like many other landscape photographers, I compromise with a DSLR. This isn't just a good compromise between physical weight and image detail. I use a DSLR mostly because it's more flexible. It gives me both convenience and control.

A compact camera will select the focus, aperture, shutter speed and equivalent ISO for me which is quick and easy, but may not give the result I want. A plate camera (or any other manual camera) leaves me to do all that myself. This gives me full control - and plenty of chances to make a mistake. It's also slow, which may mean that the rainbow fades or the eagle files away from the perfect position. My lovely DSLR, on the other hand, will do everything automatically, unless I chose to override. So I can take a quick shot, and then decide that really I want to tweak the setting. For example, I may want to set a very small aperture (to maximize the depth of field). This means I need a slow shutter speed to compensate, but that's OK, because now I have time to put the camera on a tripod (and not all compacts have tripod sockets either.) Alternatively, I might decide that all that snow is going to fool the light meter, and increase the exposure. Of I might decide I want a very slow shutter speed to make the waterfall blur (it looks wetter like that).

There's more. My compact has a 3x optical zoom, but the DSLR has detachable lenses. Between them, they cover a wider range of focal lengths than the compact. More importantly, some have a much, much greater maximum aperture - wonderful for shooting in poor light, or reducing the depth of field. They even have filter threads. True, you can hand hold a filter in front of a compact, but you tend to have to concentrate so hard on juggling the two things that you don't see the coke can in the foreground until you get home.

So a DSLR isn't essential for taking good landscape photographs, but it certainly makes it easier. Why make it hard for yourself?

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