Everyone has a camera now…

** THIS IS A RANT WARNING! This post is me personally fussing about something and is unlikely to have any useful information. **

Thanks smartphones and point and shoots! Now anyone can be a “photographer!”

Recently I was informed of a site called You Are Not A Photographer. At first glance, it looks like it’s a site that just bashes on really bad photos… don’t get me wrong, it does do that, but it’s a good bit of fun. At the same time it makes you think a lot… there are people out there that take sub par, out of focus, blurry photos and post them selectively colored with no purpose at all. Some people are shelling out hundreds of dollars for hundreds of crappy looking images like this. A few posts ago I showed you that I can produce a nice looking portrait with my iPhone 6. That photo looks better than a whole CD full of crap images like what you see on that site.

A personal story about losing business to a Fauxtog…

A few years ago, someone I was interested in taking senior photos for decided to instead take her business to one of these fauxtographers. I really wasn’t annoyed that the girl decided to choose someone else locally… but my thoughts changed a lot once I saw how awful terrible indescribably bad abominable the images were. My first thought was, “how much did she pay for this crap?” Now I’m not saying my photography is perfect… it’s far from it… but not one single Senior photo in the gallery of 66 pictures on Facebook beats what I could do with my Nikon 1 V2 which is the worst performing sensor in a camera body that I own right now. In fact, I could beat that gallery with my iPhone and a piece of white foam core easily.

Pretty much every “wtf” you see in the pictures on You Are Not A Photographer is present in that gallery… pointless selective coloring, blurry out of focus pictures, extremely blown highlights, fake “zoom in,” really bad attempts to blur the photo around a subject, overdone vignettes (I have nothing against a subtle vignette but if it’s so dark that it’s a black ring around the whole photo, NO!), and whatever other cheesy editing technique you could think of… it’s probably there. Worst of all, this photographer has no concept of exposure as several photos are over/under exposed and no understanding of light as 95% of the photos didn’t even have flattering light… and of the few that did, only one photo even looks like it’s actually clear and in focus.

So what makes this worse… people like the gallery. In fact, almost 400 people like their Facebook page… I don’t understand it. There is more than enough solid photography on the internet to notice that something a lot is lacking with these photos. I realize that some people value quantity over quality, but I personally can’t understand the logic of paying for 65 crap images, versus 5 good solid images that flatter the subject and make them look their best.

What’s really funny is that people like this out there that are calling themselves “professionals.” One of my previous blog posts explains why I don’t use that word to describe myself even though I can take a decent photo. I still have a lot of work to do to get to a level where I’d say my images rival a professional and I readily admit that, but some of these people are absolutely delusional and it’s funny and sad at the same time. I know people that don’t charge for their shooting at all because they just like to do it for fun… they produce work worlds better than what this girl shelled out $100 for.

If there are any start up photographers reading this… please be open to criticism and strive to improve your imagery. Recognize your best work, but pay attention to what real professionals are doing and use their imagery as inspiration to improve. Hell, if it will help you learn… try to recreate some of their work even (just mention it was inspired by them if you post it to the internet). In the end, all I ask is that you please don’t advertise as a pro, post absolute crap, and charge clients for photos if you really can’t produce work that’s worth paying for. If I can hand an absolute newbie my D5300 and put it on auto and their image comes out more clear and better exposed than your whole gallery… you should not be selling your work.

~rensuchan

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The Fauxtography Movement (Rant) | 2014 | Life & Events, Photography | Tags: | Comments (0)

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