“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

This sage advice is from perhaps the most influential photographer and art philosopher in the history of photography. I see this quote at least once a week on social media, but I only recently began to mull it over in any great depth. Let’s use it as a talking point to discuss artistic development in photography.
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As Apple’s WWDC kicks off this week, my thoughts keep coming back to the heated debate with my friends about the future of photography.

Let me step back for a second. Marissa Mayer famously said a few weeks ago that there’s no such thing as professional photographer anymore. The Internet rage followed, and she apologized, saying that what she meant is that we all take photos now. And it’s true. Nothing has revolutionized photography and made it truly global as Apple’s iPhone.
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(I’m not saying this is how the conversation went down at the Chicago Sun-Times last week, but I’m saying it could have.)

Good morning, everyone.

Is the entire photography staff here? …26, 27, 28…yes, it looks like everyone is present and accounted for, so let’s begin.

We don’t need you.
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I was a kid in the early 90s and my brother would often drive me around. One day, on the radio, a song came on by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. My brother turned to me and asked, “Can you believe how popular this song is?” I didn’t understand what he was asking. “I like this song,” I said. “Yeah fine, but it sounds like it’s from the 40’s.” This was one of the first times in my life that I had become aware of time.

Not time, like wristwatch time. The grand idea of time. That long incomprehensible string that was here before me and that’d be here after I’ve gone. A pretty heavy concept to be born from listening to a Squirrel Nut Zippers song.
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“Do you like selling?”

I saw this question in a recent video for a Photo Cloud system and thought it was a brilliantly clever line. The company asking the question uses a communal Woodstock approach in the hopes of obtaining new clients. (And by Woodstock, I mean the 1969 Free Love Fest in Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, NY, filled with sex, drugs and rock and roll, not the little yellow best friend of Snoopy. Although that could probably work, too.)
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(I won’t lie to you, I have no sources I can cite for the positions I intend to take in this post. These are simply my opinions from having lived on this planet. And, of course, you know what they say about opinions…)

I think we can all agree that photography is an art form. (At least I hope we can, because that’s one of the central premises with which I’m working.) But what, then, is art? Why do we aspire to make it in the first place?
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This appears to be a big week for Yahoo! with their $1 billion Tumblr acquisition announcement followed by a number of changes to their Flickr service. Exciting stuff in the tech world. However, amid the Yahoo! hoopla, CEO Marissa Mayer managed to insult the entire professional photography community with her comments, being widely interpreted as “there’s no such thing as professional photographers” anymore.
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I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2-megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?
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Professional photographers using their smartphones is just a fad, I thought, but it all came to me sooner than I expected. Some 3 weeks ago I was diagnosed with central serous retinopathy in my left eye and was hospitalised for 3 days. In the process, I finally discovered smartphone photography!
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Pictures like this drive me nuts. I call it Meanwhile, Back at the Supreme Court. It captures the boisterous scene outside that building as right and left wing demonstrators clashed after the contested election of 2000. While all this was happening, President George W. Bush was delivering his first inaugural address in the background over loudspeakers. It was an exciting and historic experience to witness and document, but until now, I’ve never shown this image to anyone. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even exist until last night.

The reason? It’s fake. The moment it depicts never happened.
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