You Are Not A Photographer

The thing about digital photography (and of course photoshop) is that it make photography much cheaper than it was. What Photoshop cheap at £600 or whatever it costs these days? Yes. Compare that with stock, developing and printing costs for a prolific photographer over just one year.

But many of the sorts of disasters shown on this site are nothing new. BITD the equivalent of Photoshop was a box of Cokin filters and a hand toning kit. But in those days the cost of calling yourself a professional was much higher. Not only did you need your camera gear, you also needed a fully kitted darkroom and to buy all your consumables film, chemicals, paper, etc.

So the difference between today and a quarter of a century ago was that these deluded fools remained "talented" (ahem) amateurs rather than going into (and rapidly out of) business as a pro.

There was still the curse of the appalling wedding photographer back then. There were "schools" that allowed you to take a correspondence course as a wedding photographer and gave you a nice certificate at the end of it. They also gave you help in setting up your business and promised you loads of business in your first year. All for a substantial fee of course. It wasn't very different from the schemes you come across in many other trades. I've met several people who comissioned one of these so called professionals over the years. And every one ended up out of pocket and without any good photographs of their wedding day. Unless of course there were friends at the wedding with some aptitude for photography.

When I first looked at that pic, I thought it was an astronomy photo..

The link in a nutshell:
pregnant woman + spot color = bad photo.

At a glance I thought that this may be an attempt to photograph the ballroom of the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Dark rides are difficult to photograph. Then I went to the site, enlarged the image, and saw that it was labeled "wedding". Wow.

The best wedding pictures are those that people will admire and treasure 100 years from now. Don't embarrass your great-grandchildren.

It's sad that people like this are the reason that true professionals don't get paid what they deserve, when they actually take time to light, meter, and expose a photo correctly, and use more than 1 filter they stumbled across in photoshop after downloading the program for free off the internet.