I’m not critic, so take what I write here with a grain of salt.

Recently I was reading an article online, and there was a comment, the gist of which was: today’s photographers aren’t great.  Not on a technical, nor on an artistic level.  Most of them take the same, boring photos and apply some actions in photoshop, or a trendy effect.  In a few years, we’ll look at these photos and be able to date them by the effect: “this must have been taken in 2008 or 2009, it’s a classic Kubota“. These photographs will have lower value in the long run due to their limited range of style.

This has been on my mind over the past few days (no, don’t think I’ve forgotten about the cruise – I’m scattered like that). There’s a certain truth to this: in the not-so-distant past, photographers got their start in the darkroom.  They learned how to process their own prints, develop their own negatives.  They understood the technical details.  They knew how film reacted to light. They understood a certain amount of physics and chemistry.  They took this to the field, where they applied artistic principles to their shots.  Even today, with film: you take a slower, more careful photo than you would with a digital camera.  You can use the non-linear burnout rate of film to create different, sometimes better compositions due to dynamic range compression. You try to get it right the first time.

There’s no undo in film.

But on the other hand, there’s a certain falsehood.  True, there will never be another Ansel Adams.  But there are millions of talented people out there with cameras.  Yes, they shoot and post-process to the tastes of the times, but I see the same thing when I go over wedding photographs.  If nothing else, you can date a photo by the hairstyles, right? And the posing styles most certainly change over the years.

So I disregard the argument that trends make weaker photographs.