The Problem of Mass Production in Photography: why Canon, Sony, and Nikon are not our friends.

The Preamble:

In our other case study, (The Art World's Mishandling of the Medium of Photography) we explored how higher-minded institutions – such as the fine art world, and the photography programs at major colleges and universities – have impeded the development of this medium by elevating subject selection, and the development of non-photographic talents, above the actual medium itself, and how, in doing so, they’ve neglected to teach this medium's higher capabilities to the very people who will go on to shape and champion the medium throughout the next generation.  

This page will be used to examine the other great navigator of this medium: the “photo industry.” 

For the purposes of this discussion, the "Photo Industry" will encompass two separate but related groups, each wielding a mighty influence over the direction and development of this medium. 

First, we have the companies that design and manufacture our tools and equipment, such as our cameras, our lenses, and our software applications. Examples of such companies would include Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Adobe. 

And second, we have the professional photographers who use those tools and applications in their day-to-day occupational tasks, such as wedding photographers, sports photographers, food photographers, and portrait photographers.

In short, instead of examining the impact of the intellectual and academic communities on the development of this medium, we're going to be discussing the impact of the commercial photography community – ie: the camera companies, and the "pros” – who together serve as maybe the most prolific gateway between this medium and the general public.

What we will discover here is that, if the fine art community has mis-navigated this medium on a more theoretical level, ignoring photography’s higher capabilities and stifling the growth of photography as a visual language, then the photography “industry" has mis-navigated this medium on a much more practical level, by abstracting the technical processes of photography into a limited, closed-circuit framework of proprietary technology, one that allows companies like Canon and Sony to control the very manner in which photographers both practice, and understand, their craft.

Companies like Canon, Sony, and Nikon are “consumer electronics” companies first and foremost, which means the key dilemma facing occupational photographers is that they practice one of the very few forms of professional expertise that sources its tools - and its methodologies - almost exclusively from a consumer marketplace.

And knowing this is the case, these companies design their photographic tools in ways that are not always efficient or even particularly beneficial to us, but rather in ways that are simply more profitable to themselves within that marketplace.

And they accomplish this, primarily, by designing cameras that coerce photographers into a dependency on their own proprietary “solutions,” as well as a dependency on their own unique operating systems and terminology, because they know that doing so will breed a far greater brand-loyalty among the people who buy their cameras.

For their part in all of this, we’ll find that “pro” photographers have fallen into the trap of blindly trusting the “solutions” that these companies are peddling, while building almost their entire understanding of photography - and their entire professional approach - around those tools and solutions. Moreover, they form almost all of their industry “jargon” and nearly all of their professional “culture” around those proprietary solutions as well.

And so whereas the professional photography community should be positioning itself as a counter-balance, forming a more adversarial relationship that might keep these companies in check, while simultaneously pressuring them into designing tools that allow for more efficiency in operation, or even just tools that EXPAND the complexities and possibilities for how they can shoot…. instead, as things currently stand, we have the opposite.

As things currently stand, Nikon/Sony/Canon design technologies that limit photographers, in fact, technologies that corner photographers into using a lot of ineffective methodology….and then our industry “pros” not only embrace those ineffective methods, but they maintain a baffling and enthusiastic loyalty toward the very companies that are boxing them in.

Introduction: A Tale of Two Methodologies

To illustrate the problem at hand as concisely as possible, I’d like to begin by comparing two very distinct batches of contemporary wedding photographs.

First, let’s have a look at batch #1:

I’ll start by noting that there’s nothing particularly wrong with any of these images. They get the job done.

In fact, all are fairly typical for the wedding industry, which means if you have wedding pictures of your own, there’s a very good chance they resemble these here. So you might consider this batch to be something like “the industry standard.”

But now here’s batch #2:

This second batch is not as typical, which is to say that relatively few people have wedding pictures that look like these. And because of that we tend to say that these images are a bit more remarkable, or rare, or that they impart a more vivid narrative energy….or that they’re more cinematic.

In other words, we tend to think of these as rising above the “industry standard.”

But what, specifically, is different about them?

Well some might posit that these latter images have been taken by more notable, or higher earning photographers.

Which is true. These pictures have all been culled from the portfolios of internationally award-winning photographers. In fact, it might even be the case that only one or two wedding photographers in your region produce this kind of work with any regularity, particularly if you live outside the largest and most competitive markets, such as New York or Los Angeles.

However, notoriety and earning power are consequences of this type of shooting, not the other way around. So that assessment says nothing of what these photographers are actually doing differently.

If pressed, and without the relevant technical vocabulary, in my experience the layperson will often reach for more qualitative explanations. For instance, they’ll say the latter group of photographers is simply more “talented,” or that those photographers have a better knack for capturing the right moments, or that they have some “intangible photographic eye.”

But the purpose of this essay is to clarify that the factors distinguishing these two groups of images are a lot more concrete than most people realize, and have little to do with the photographer possessing any kind of mystically innate talent. This has more to do with the way a photographer has been taught to understand the medium, and the technical approach they take to their shooting.

And the formulaic simplicity of that first batch is due, in large part, to the ways Canon/Nikon/Sony have designed their equipment, and how they’ve encouraged photographers to practice and understand the medium using that equipment.

Because the technical “solutions” (the camera features) that these companies have designed are very limited in what they can do.

And therefore in convincing the public that these proprietary solutions are not just one limited shortcut to getting some fairly simplistic images — but rather, they’ve convinced the public that their own proprietary solutions ARE the very fundamental skills that every photographer should be learning — these companies have condemned a lot of professional photographers to a relatively small and mediocre subset of what can be accomplished with a camera.

Specifically, they’ve incentivized photographers to select shots based on what they know their camera’s algorithms can handle, rather than to select shots based on the most poignant or most sophisticated result their scenes might allow.

Or in short: professional photographers have reversed the flow chart on how to take pictures, to where, instead of adapting their process to fit their own creative vision, they do the opposite, they adapt their eye toward seeking the predetermined shots their technology was programmed to take.

And it’s absolutely crucial to note that this assessment doesn’t apply solely to the camera features that are marketed as “fully automatic” functions. This actually applies even more-so to the “advanced features” of a modern camera, the ones most pros have come to depend on (the histograms, the metering modes, the hdr compilers).

Because underneath every one of those seemingly sophisticated features is a set of algorithms and engineering decisions that opaquely governs (and limits) the framework for how an image is captured and understood. And in my experience, few photographers actually understand the logic of what’s happening underneath the interface of their cameras.

So returning to the question, “What SPECIFICALLY is different about these two sets of images?”

Well, the most tangible difference is that the photographers who shot the first batch have been implicitly taught to avoid any physical variables in their scene that might confuse their camera’s pre-determined response systems. And to that end, they’ve composed a shot that has no significant lighting differentials, no heavily disparate layers of space, no moving subjects (ie: they’ve been taught to compose a simplistic, “one size fits all” kind of scene) …. so that their camera’s algorithms won’t become confused. Because doing so will allow them to use all of the engineered camera features they learned about in their workshops and tutorials, and all without any real fear that those camera features will keep “messing up.”

And as a side note, in my experience these professional photographers aren’t particularly aware that this was the logic behind the methods they were taught. More what happened is these methods were selected for them, paternalistically, by those within the industry who’ve connected the dots between the fallibility of a camera’s algorithms and the methods that best neutralize those fallibilities.

And then by the time it all trickles down to aspiring professionals and newcomers, these methods are authoritatively sold to them as “the industry standard” or “what most pros do,” and furthermore, it’s all been tightly wrapped in a package of esoteric-sounding technical jargon that it now has the unquestioned veneer of technical legitimacy.

But on the flip side, the photographers represented by that second batch are much more familiar with the underlying properties of photography (as opposed to just their camera’s interface), which means they can intentionally hunt for different amounts of light, different layers of space, different kinds of movement, etc., and then, rather than fear those variables - rather than avoid the actual photographic assets of their scenes - they can USE those properties in order to structure and punctuate their images.

So that’s the primary difference between these two batches of images.

But the key problem here is that this latter approach is practiced by only a very small segment of the professional community. The overwhelming majority of professional photographers that I encounter demonstrate little-to-no substantive knowledge regarding the underlying workings of photography, and have instead learned this medium entirely through the abstraction of features and functions that have been built into the their camera’s interface.

Which means their entire understanding of this medium comes through the translation of photography that Canon, Sony, and Adobe have given to them…which, in turn, gives a lot of unquestioned power to these companies regarding the public’s perceptions about “how photography works.” And moreover, it also allows these companies to push for methodologies and industry standards that are simply more profitable for themselves.

And then finally, in addition to building their methods around such technologies, most pro photographers then also use their authority and reputation to perpetuate these methods, en mass, through the advice they impart to emerging hobbyists and aspiring professionals.

So at the end of the day we’ll find that much of the ‘conventional wisdom’ we get from the photo industry actually puts very defined limitations on those who follow it, which makes a lot of it really bad advice.

And despite what many professional photographers seem to believe, it doesn’t take an extraordinary amount of in-born talent, or an advanced degree in mechanical engineering, to be able to produce more versatile and more sophisticated results.

In fact, it’s just as easy to learn how to exploit photographic variables as it is to learn to avoid them.

The problem is - and here’s the rub - it’s far, far more profitable for Canon/Sony/Nikon that photographers remain hooked on their own proprietary solutions. And to that end, they’ve designed their interfaces and operating systems in ways that often coax, trick, and strong-arm photographers into using those solutions. And moreover, they use their far-reaching market presence, and their vast networks of workshops, tutorials, and product representatives, to sell photographers on the idea that their own technologies and algorithms are the best path to better images.

Whereas, on the other side of this issue, there is no equal and worthy adversary to counter their arguments, no robustly-funded and well-organized effort that might caution the public against such methods, which means that the companies who comprise this powerful Photography Industrial Complex get to enjoy the lone voice on the matter.

So to summarize this entire dilemma:

Our ‘Industry Standard’ for professional photography has been vastly oversimplified – “dumbed down” if you will – in order to accommodate the grossly inefficient, but highly-profitable technologies that camera companies prefer to sell…..and to my observations, most professional photographers aren’t particularly even aware of this dynamic.

In fact, it’s all rather quite the opposite.

Most professionals whole-heartedly believe that it’s in using these very technologies that their expertise is legitimized, because, quite ironically, they think that mastering their camera’s most esoteric features is what will make them more advanced and more knowledgeable shooters. They’re so caught up in the thrill of speaking an exclusive language of insider’s jargon, and racing their colleagues to the newest technologies, that they haven’t stopped to notice that the vast majority of the tech that these companies are producing actually benefits those companies far more than it benefits them.

But ASOP’s entire schtick these past 10 years has been to take common, ordinary citizens, almost none of whom identify as being abnormally “talented” or “mechanically inclined,” and enabling them to take the kinds of pictures exhibited in that second batch within only a few months of starting. And the reason we’ve been able to do this is because we demonstrate to our students, again and again, that the photographers who achieve more vivid and dynamic images do so NOT because they rely on a limited set of camera features that have been designed by a team of engineers in order to address the properties of their scenes FOR THEM, they do so because they’ve been taught, more directly, how to understand and value the very underlying properties that those engineers were trying to address.

And whereas the engineers who designed our cameras were hamstrung by the limitations of their own generic system - a system that has to predict, in advance, how the lowest common denominator might want to take a picture, and then impose those assumptions onto the shooter….on the opposite end of the spectrum, photographers who practice the medium more directly, from OUTSIDE the rules of that limited and compromised system, are privy to hundreds of alternative ways for structuring an image, ways that aren’t always available to photographers who restrict themselves to the confines of such systems.

And if ASOP can teach total beginners how to perform to those standards in under a year’s time, then our culture should damn well expect professional photographers, who‘ve devoted their lives and careers to practicing this medium, to meet and exceed those same standards as well.

So the purpose of this article is to unpack this whole crazy mess - to explore and diagnose the various causes of how the industry got to where it is today, and then to offer a prescription for how photographers might be able to limit the influence that companies like Canon, Nikon, and Adobe have over our photographic standards and methods.

Final Introductory Thought:

What’s at stake here, or why does any of this matter?

Before we dive in, I’d like to offer one final note that goes beyond the scope of the current photography industry, and speaks more toward the far-reaching societal implications of what’s being discussed in this essay.

The endgame photographers need to be striving for here is a loosening of the powerful grip these companies have over the way that photography is practiced. And among the long list of reasons this needs to be done, the one that probably tops the list is the fact that the medium of photography represents a new and spectacularly useful form of emerging literacy.

This medium holds the potential to be a system of visual grammar that can completely alter human thinking, in much the same way that our written language helped advance human thinking in previous centuries. But the difference here is that, while our spoken and written languages were allowed to develop outside the influences of corporate profit models, photography is currently developing entirely within them.

In other words, while our culture is increasingly moving toward using word processors and apps that will auto-complete our sentences, and auto-correct our grammar (which will undoubtedly begin to affect the way we all speak and write), at least our written language was allowed to develop a great deal first, for several millennia in fact, before we then started imposing these kinds of paternalistic patterns and formulas. And at the individual level, the average person has been widely exposed to the written language (if not made totally fluent) before they’ve been offered such devices.

Photography, on the other hand, is a language that is having these patterns imposed upon it from the get go, before mass literacy has been achieved, and before photography has had a chance to develop into a more sophisticated mode of communication. And at the individual level, photographers are being offered these devices before they have any real understanding of the medium at all, which makes them entirely dependent on the companies who design them.

Thus, shifting control over the evolution of this medium back toward photographers themselves (and away from these companies) is likelier to result in a more sophisticated photographic language, and a world in which more complex images become the norm across all uses of photography, simply because it would encourage millions of photographers from across the globe to prod and explore until they’ve uncovered increasingly more sophisticated results.

In other words, it would allow for a more organic, more complex evolution of photography to unfold….as opposed to what we have now, which is a world in which these companies are boxing photographers in from the very start with a lot of pre-packaged solutions, and limiting them to a painfully finite set of pre-determined results.

And importantly, such a shift would also allow for photography to become practiced as a more conscious and more purposeful medium. Because at the moment, this is a medium being practiced in a lot of indirect and unconscious ways (and frankly, through a lot of trial and error), and also through a total dependency on the opaque functions designed by profit-seeking companies.

So in summary: photographers are increasingly becoming walled in, cut off from any true understanding of the medium they’re practicing, and are only able to engage this medium through a series of pre-determined, task-specific camera functions that were designed more to maximize Canon/Sony/Nikon’s profit margins than they were designed to expand our use and understanding of this medium.

And while that mode of photography may be convenient and useful to the more casual consumer, when that kind of superficial methodology is adopted by the very top of the industry, it puts an abrupt stop on the growth and expansion of this medium’s capabilities, as well as on the growth and expansion of our collective photographic language.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

Part 1: They Make Our Tools

How did we get here?

Well to begin, it needs to be established that just about any practice of photography is almost entirely dependent upon mass production.  

While other kinds of artists have the option of relying upon mass-produced goods, they also have the option of developing their respective crafts with some modicum of independence. Painters, for instance, can create their own colors, or construct their own brushes out of new materials, they can also paint on surfaces other than stretched canvas.   Sculptors can harvest their own clay, and fashion their own unique tools.  Collage artists can make their own paper, and dye it with their own pigments, etc.  

But when discussing the medium of photography, it is wholly unrealistic to expect photographers to form their own optical glass in order to craft their own lenses, or to build their own precision shutter, one that’s accurate to within 1/1000 of a second.

And even if they could, doing so would only cover the barest fundamentals of the medium.

If a photographer really wanted to practice this medium with any kind of efficiency, convenience, or adaptability, they’d have to engineer several different kinds of lenses, build their own flash units, and design a unique, customized operating system that might be able to coordinate all those functions together.

And even in the event that one single photographer had all of the knowledge and skills required for each of those tasks, they'd still need a team of dozens of specialized workers to help them, and the costs would be astronomical.

In fact, just to commission an existing company to build a custom system of lenses, sensors, flashes, and software (basically an entire "prototype" system) would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the low end, and millions of dollars on the high end, which means that, when it comes to photographic tools, total autonomy is not a realistic pursuit.

So we’re all dependent upon mass production in order to practice this medium at all.

One easy way to describe the current situation is that if it would be prohibitively expensive to build an entire custom photographic system, then what we've done instead is we've all collectively gone in together on a mass “group discount.” Companies build thousands of generic cameras/lenses/flashes for us, and that means we can all purchase a relatively complete photographic system for something more in the ballpark of $3,000.  

Whereas, if cameras were made as boutique items, exclusively for the expert professional (the way that medical tools are made in small batches, exclusively for licensed surgeons), photographic systems would probably cost over $30k-$50k.

But unlike medical experts, our use of this medium is heavily subsidized by millions of casual consumers, typical citizens who buy cameras to use for recreational purposes, or to capture their special occasions and travels. And these millions of casual consumers increase camera sales immensely, allowing Canon/Nikon/Sony to offer their systems at a much lower price point. And that means expert photographers get to purchase their gear in the much cheaper "consumer" marketplace, as opposed to medical professionals, who are required to purchase their tools in the astronomically more expensive "industrial" marketplace. 

But basically what this means is that we’ve gotten in bed with large, profit-driven, consumer-facing corporations not just for the supplemental aspects of our medium…but just to be able to practice this medium in any way at all.

Thus, the greater cost of going in for this ‘mass discount’ is that we've incentivized camera makers (who, remember, are the only plausible source for our tools) to develop their business models around their consumer clientele, who form a much, much larger portion of their market base, and are thus far more profitable to them.

And the expert photographer is then required to use a lot of equipment that has been manufactured to meet the demands and assumptions of millions of uneducated amateurs and hobbyists.

And this particular dynamic, wherein trained experts have to use equipment that’s been designed to satisfy the whims of a consumer-facing market is a relatively unique phenomenon for any professional field.

Doctors, for instance, rarely have their opinions brushed aside by medical supply companies who’ve suddenly pivoted toward selling their MRI machines and Lithotripters to a more profitable consumer crowd.

Or even just sticking within the realm of creative professionals, it’s unlikely that concert cellists have to worry that the designs of their cellos will succumb to corporate marketing gimmicks, or the misinformed whims of untrained consumers.

But photographers have to worry about that all the time.

So all of this is to say that if you want to engage in any kind of serious practice of photography, heavy amounts of compromise have been built into the process from the outset, from the very initial step in which you acquire the only tools available for you to practice this medium at all.

Which, again, seems a relatively unique dilemma.

Because while countless other modes of art and communication have been influenced by, and even compromised by consumer economics…very few have been forced to develop exclusively through them, the way that photography has.

Part 2: They Also Make Our Strategies

But here's the even bigger problem: it isn't merely the physical tools that are being mass produced; it's also the methodologies and the strategic approaches to the medium that are being manufactured as well.…ie: the actual paradigms about photography.

In other words, there are many biases and limitations being hard-wired into our tools, and then our subsequent methodologies and strategies are built around accommodating those biases and limitations.

And all of this heavily influences what people think photography IS, and how they think photography WORKS.

So what kinds of biases and limitations are we talking about, exactly? 

Well, imagine that every photographic function on your camera - every shutter, every strobe, and most importantly, every algorithm - is essentially a solution to a photographic problem. And the way that each one came about is that, historically speaking, photographers were encountering logistical problems that prevented them from obtaining the exact results they wanted, so engineers began to design and patent solutions to those problems. And then, further down the line, large companies began to mass-produce those solutions.  

And we’ve now arrived at a point in history where most photographers simply assume that those solutions were written in stone, from the very beginning of time, as the best, or only, way to practice this medium.

But the truth is, each of those problems had several, perhaps even dozens of potential solutions. It’s just that a lot of solutions won out simply because they were easier to integrate into existing equipment. Others came to market sooner and then came to be taken for granted by the industry. Some solutions were easier to explain to the consumer, and therefore easier to market. And some were simply more cost-effective. 

The very boring and predictable bottom line on this is that the solutions that are more profitable, or easier to market to the public, are the solutions that tend to win out.

But that means that if certain solutions are being hard-wired into our equipment at the expense of others, it also means that certain BIASES are being hard-wired into our equipment, along with certain assumptions about how to even approach photography in the first place.

In other words:

The choices those engineers make often determine what kinds of approaches we can and can’t take in our shooting, which means the choices they make put very specific limitations on us…which, in turn, heavily influences our paradigms about how photography even works.

And this has always been true in at least some form.

As far back as 1900, the earliest mass-produced cameras forced photographers to conform to certain increments and measurements. For instance, early shutters were designed in “1 stop” increments, which basically meant that each turn of the dial would either double or halve the amount of light that was being exposed. And photographers had little choice but to accept those increments.

It was also manifest in the way Kodak's chemists favored certain film grains over others, which affected the overall look and texture of the picture, as well as the way a photographer might need to adapt their darkroom processes.

But this became infinitely and more poignantly true in the 1980's and 1990's by the way Canon and Nikon chose to design the operating systems and algorithms that govern the camera’s physical functions, ie: the algorithms that indicate which particular apertures and shutters you should use..…the algorithms that try to take the picture for you. 

At that point it became not merely the physical components of photography that were being mass-produced, but the actual STRATEGIES of photography as well. For instance, the way your camera’s “metering mode” determines which part of the scene you should expose for, or how the Aperture Priority Mode determines the length of your exposure.

Further, the engineers who were designing cameras way back in 1900 were making decisions for a relatively small and knowledgeable community of photographers, which meant that when it came time to make decisions that might restrict what a photographer could do, they had to use the best of their abilities to determine what might be the “lesser of all evils,” knowing full well that their customers might be aware of what compromises have been made.

Thus, they made a lot of those early compromises and restrictions “in good faith,” and probably somewhat apologetically.

But today the most restrictive decisions made by Canon/Sony/Nikon are made far more intentionally, and they’re aimed at a much less knowledgeable group of consumers. And when those decisions are made, they aren’t at all seeking the “lesser of evils;” they’re very clearly making decisions that prioritize profitability over the most expansive or logical needs of expert photographers.

Or worse, they’re making decisions based on the desire to manipulate the assumptions and perceptions of an unknowing consumer public.

Alright, before all of this gets to be a bit too dense, I‘d like to pause for a minute here and more concisely summarize the dilemma that’s being established in this section:

For any photographer out there with ambitions to mastering this medium, you first need to be aware that our tools, as well as most of the strategies that accompany those tools, have been designed to manipulate the whims of a CONSUMER marketplace, a marketplace whose participants understand very little of how photography works beneath the surface of the interface they’ve been given by these camera companies.

And this has given these companies a lot of unquestioned, unilateral control over how this medium is understood and practiced.

Thus, instead of a power dynamic in which these manufacturers respond to the needs of experts and industry leaders, we have the opposite. We have a power dynamic in which these manufacturers set the paradigms and standards for photography however they want…… because they’re doing so for a largely photo-illiterate consumer public. And therefore they do it in ways that more reliably benefit their own preferred business models, as opposed to in ways that more universally improve and develop this medium.

In short: this has left us with an entire industry where, instead of camera makers responding to the demands of knowledgeable experts, it’s evolved to be exactly the other way around: professionals photographers are learning all of their “expertise” from Canon/Sony/Nikon product reps.

Or one last way to describe the situation would be to say that the basic economics of the camera industry work something like this: Camera companies create the “supply” of products that they prefer to make first, and then after they’ve determined which products will be the most profitable to themselves in the long run, they then work really hard to generate “demand” for those products among photo-illiterate consumers, through a sophisticated system of marketing strategies.

And then photographic experts are stuck working with whatever tools emerge from that process.

And this has been the origin story for nearly every piece of camera technology that’s hit the market in the past half-century.

And just to keep in mind what’s at stake here: these companies are essentially the gatekeepers to the only realistic tools we have in order to access and develop what might be the most important and influential form of human language to emerge since the written word.

…which means this is a massive, massive problem.

Part 3: Professional Photographers Are Largely Unaware of This Dilemma

Ok, so here’s maybe the very deepest part of the problem: we’ve now arrived at a point where most photographers (particularly most professionals) now just assume that the solutions that Canon and Nikon have chosen are simply, inherently, "how photography works." 

People now look upon their camera's engineered functions (not just the physical functions, such as the shutters and the apertures, but also the strategic functions, such as the metering modes, the histograms, and the auto-bracketing) and they take for granted that those functions ARE photography, which is to say that when people are learning about metering modes, histograms, and auto-bracketing, they think they're learning "photography.”

But those functions aren’t photography.

Photography is the underlying phenomena those functions were designed to address. For instance, the need to record one amount of light in your scene as opposed to another. Or the need to emphasize one layer of space in your scene as opposed to another. Or the need to allow one amount of time to pass while the picture is being recorded as opposed to another.  Etc.

Those are the inherent properties of photography.  And each of those properties can be addressed in dozens of potential ways.

Histograms, metering modes, exposure compensation dials, etc., are not inherent properties of the medium. Each of those functions is a limited solution that some engineers developed in order to address these properties in a relatively generic and affordable framework ….solutions that could then be standardized and mass produced, and - most importantly - monetized. 

Thus, if one’s act of  "learning photography" consists mostly of studying metering modes/histograms/camera features, etc., it needs to be made clear that you aren't really learning Photography, you're learning one very limited and biased translation of photography.

So in light of all this, consider that we can now break the world into two classifications of photographers:

1) Photographers who deeply understand the medium and its properties INDEPENDENT of the equipment they’ve been given… who then build and adapt their strategies as cleverly as they can around the mass-produced equipment they have no choice but to use.

2) Photographers who don't really see or understand this distinction at all, who instead have learned photography exclusively THROUGH their camera functions and their “tech,” and who believe that the framework that Nikon/Sony/Canon have hardwired into their cameras IS photography.

And at the time of this writing, most photographers, including the overwhelming majority of professionals, tend to be the latter.

And to understand why this dynamic has become so counterproductive to the development of this industry, let’s first examine the distinctions in how these two types of photographers behave and operate, and then we can examine the kinds of images that result from either behavior.

Part 4: Two Very Different Approaches To This Medium

The first type of photographer (we’ll call them "Type A") understands the properties of a given scene very directly, independent of their unique camera interface. They understand all of the ways that light, distances, spatial relationships, angles of movement, etc., can affect their images, and they know how all of those assets can be addressed and exploited directly.

And for the record, as daunting as all of that may sound, these skills aren’t particularly difficult to acquire. In fact, I’ve spent the past decade proving that just about anyone can learn to do this. The difficulty of practicing “direct” photography is about on par with the difficulty of operating a motor vehicle, which is to say that it may appear very alien and complicated to someone who’s never done it before, but it takes only a few months for the average person to learn how to do it both comfortably and competently, and it certainly doesn’t take a science wiz to master.

But if we were to elaborate on just one of those photographic dynamics I just mentioned, let’s say, the LIGHT within the scene, our Type A photographer knows how many ways that light can be useful, how many ways it can be captured, how many ways it can be used to change the emphasis of the image, or change the shape of the image, how many ways it can conceal or reveal parts of the image, and finally, how many ways it can be used to alter the sensibility or the mood of the image. 

At which point this photographer willfully and “directly” chooses the exact manner in which they prefer to exploit that light.

In order to do so, this photographer uses mostly manual functions, which are still somewhat limited by the choices that the engineers made in building them, but at least in using fully manual functions, this photographer has taken the programmed responses out of the process.

In other words, while this photographer has no input into how the physical aspects of the camera have been designed (the apertures, shutters, and focal lengths), they do have full autonomy over how those mechanical functions are to be deployed, which means this photographer has taken the pre-imposed strategies out of the process.

In short, this photographer no longer has to worry that the camera’s predetermined responses will interfere with what they are doing, which means they don’t constantly have to “fight” with their camera.

And that ensures that this method is faster and more efficient (which surprises most people, but is actually very easy to demonstrate). It also ensures they can achieve a greater variety and complexity of results, and also achieve more exact results, which means far less time is wasted using post-processing software.

But importantly, this method requires real knowledge of the medium itself, and not just knowledge of the camera's operating system, or the proprietary solutions designed by Sony or Adobe.

The second type of photographer (“Type B") practices photography very differently.

Type B photographers forego learning the underlying, universal properties of photography, and instead choose to learn (and to trust) Canon’s or Sony’s proprietary technology. In other words, they learn Canon/Sony/Nikon’s operating system - all of the most “advanced” and “professional” features of their cameras - and then they learn Adobe’s post-processing solutions.

But the problem with this approach is that a camera’s operating system isn’t a neutral reflection of how photography works. A camera’s operating system is a reflection of the decisions and preferences of the engineers who designed it. It’s a very limited system of programmed responses (a set of pre-packaged solutions, and - more importantly - a set of rules and restrictions), written by people who are total strangers to you, in order to capture your images in one way as opposed to another. 

In short: your “tech” is merely Sony/Canon/Nikon’s singular, proprietary translation of photography.

It isn’t photography.

And going all-in on this translation is problematic for two very big reasons.

The first reason is that it is cumbersome and inefficient. In being somewhat abstract and indirect, this approach often overcomplicates things that don’t need to be complicated at all, which in turn leads to comical amounts of unnecessary logistical steps, as well a lot of unnecessary compromises.

For a quick glimpse into what I mean by that, as an analogy, imagine if our next generation of automobiles were designed so that, in order to change lanes, rather than just gently turn your steeling wheel for a moment, you instead had to hunt through a chaotic system of “change lanes functions” in your car’s operating system……and from that analogy you’d get a pretty good idea of how modern cameras are overcomplicating photography.

The second reason this approach is so problematic is that the choices the engineers have made tend to paint you into a corner, limiting the complexity and variety of results you can achieve. And that, in turn, affects your overall strategies and shot selections in ways that sometimes force photographers to settle for a lot of simplistic and mediocre images.

And this means these two types of photographers don’t just operate differently, they also end up with entirely different kinds of images.

So let’s go ahead and more thoroughly unpack each of these two problems with the “Type B” approach, beginning with that first concern: the messy INEFFICIENCY of an algorithms-based approach.

Once you start down the path of using your camera’s algorithmic features (even the more “professional” ones), the problem you quickly encounter is that the engineers at Canon/Sony/Nikon can’t predict exactly what you want to do from one scene to the next. So when they’re writing their algorithms they make a lot of generic, lowest common-denominator assumptions about what the common consumer PROBABLY wants (recall that their largest customer base is consumers, not professionals).  

For instance, statistically speaking, most amateur photographers place their subject in the center of the frame. They also tend to compose the subject so that it is nearer to the camera than other parts of the scene. Etc.

In other words, these are the kinds of choices a layperson makes when they’re shooting friends and loved ones at birthdays and weddings.

And the reason most amateurs do those things, by the way, is because they aren’t really interested in creating a more complex message, or even a more complex relationship between two different parts of their scenes.

They’re mostly just trying to record, or “show,” us something.

So the engineers at Canon/Sony/Nikon tend to program the camera’s responses with a lot of those basic assumptions in mind. For instance, they might program the camera to prioritize exposing for whatever’s in the middle of the shot, or to focus the lens on the part of the scene that’s nearest.

But again, that system has initially been designed for amateurs, who purchase the vast majority of the cameras these companies produce.

If on the other hand you’re a pro photographer, or if you’re simply a ‘more serious photographer,’ one whose shooting might stray from those expectations, then those core program functions will not be sufficient. 

So to satisfy those photographers, the engineers tack on even more algorithms — more indirect technical abstractions — that are meant to “correct” the camera’s behavior in very specific circumstances.

Think of it like this:

All cameras are initially programmed with the most basic layperson thinking hardwired into them. And then, for “Type B” professional photographers the idea of “controlling your image YOURSELF” is not to bypass this paternalistic programming altogether — shooting manually and more directly — nope, their idea of “controlling the image yourself” is to ACCEPT this base-level programing, but then to use some extra functions that might override it.

And those “extra functions” I’m referring to are the so-called "advanced features" of a modern camera — features such as exposure compensation, exposure lock, metering modes, histograms, auto-bracketing, etc.

These are the kinds of camera features that most professional tutorials are built around.

So rather than starting from scratch, with pure, universal photographic knowledge, these photographers are starting from a biased and fallible platform….and then they learn how to AMEND that platform.

And the photographers who use this approach often have to fumble through a half-dozen clumsy steps to override the assumptions made by the engineers, only to still miss a lot of shots and still end up with imperfect results.

At which point they spend several hours using post-processing software to “fix” and finalize those results. Which is where companies like Adobe step in, all too happy to introduce even more proprietary algorithms into this Photography Industrial Complex.

Or to put all of this much more concisely:

And this is how Type B photographers honestly think photography works.

Rather than learn to shoot “directly,” they’ve been taught to anticipate the mistakes their camera’s programming will make, and then they learn what functions they can use to override those mistakes.

And so what’s the overarching consequence of this kind of thinking?

Well we’ve now arrived at a point where most pro photographers whole-heartedly believe that “true expertise” means using multiple override functions until you get sort of an APPROXIMATION of the image you want (often in a trial-and-error like fashion), and then you spend several hours using post-processing software in order to fix the image, after-the-fact.

Trial-and-error…and then several hours in post.

That’s what it’s come to.

And while many of these photographers won’t quite see it this way, because their process has become so obscured (and “legitimatized”) by a fog of esoteric functions and jargon…that’s essentially what they’re doing.

So wait a minute. Professionals are really just using a lot of trial and error?

Yes. And in almost everything they do. In fact, infuriatingly so.

Later in this piece, I’ll get to the very bottom of exactly how I think we got to this point, but maybe the first thing that has to be understood here is that this kind of methodology is widely reinforced — at every opportunity — by the manufacturers who sit at the very top of the industry. Because, in addition to designing our interfaces in ways that often emphasize, or even promote, these kinds of override functions, many of the tutorials these companies publish, on their own social media pages, very openly advocate for using these functions by way of trial-and-error.

For instance, if you watch a lot of the video tutorials put out by companies like Canon, Sony, or even Profoto, what’s very typical is that the photographer hosting the tutorial will begin by snapping an image, and then examining the image’s ‘histogram’ to discuss what adjustments they think need to be made…

[Quick Aside: For those who aren’t familiar with the term “histogram,” it’s basically just a graph of all the pixel information in a given image, which pro photographers like to use in order to see if they “got their exposure right.”

It looks something like this:

The basic gist of the histogram is that, instead of being a tool that enables you to measure and evaluate the light in your scene BEFORE you begin shooting - so that you can get your desired result on the very first try - the histogram is the opposite, it’s a tool that encourages you to take a more “blind” image first (which basically means letting one of the camera’s algorithms take the picture for you), and then you can check your pixel data AFTER-THE-FACT, so that you can try again with a different “override function” if you don’t like the results]

…..so the host of the tutorial will begin by snapping an image, and then looking at the histogram of the image they’ve just shot. And then they’ll explain to the viewing audience how they think they should adjust their camera for the next take (ie: which “override” function they should use)…and then they’ll snap another image…..and then they’ll look at the histogram again..…and so on.

And once you get past the abstraction of the histogram, this methodology is just a glorified version of trial-and-error.

And perhaps the strangest dynamic in all of this is that I’m fairly certain the photographers who are hosting these tutorials, themselves, aren’t particularly aware that they’re just using trial and error, because, to them, the notion of employing some kind of esoteric “correction” tool on their camera in order to move their “histogram” just sounds super legit.

But I think what that tells us is that normalizing these kinds of proprietary abstractions, and then standardizing them into our camera’s operating systems, works really well to disguise the fact that there’s nothing particularly substantial about this process at all.

Because while these abstractions may sound very technically complex to the newcomer, in actuality, using these kinds of solutions really just limits and narrows the way a photographer understands and practices this medium, all without providing them any real insight or understanding about what’s happening beneath the surface of those abstractions.

Which means, in effect, these abstractions simultaneously limit the photographer while also keeping them dependent on opaque, proprietary technology. Which is decidedly problematic for the development of an individual photographer.

But then on top of that, these technologies also give the professional photography community (as a whole) permission to keep shooting blindly until they finally get a good result. Because when it’s done in this manner — through all of these obscure functions and jargon — suddenly it’s no longer “just shooting blindly, via trial and error”…..it’s now perceived as a “legitimate technical process.”

So in summary:

These functions both disguise and legitimize the fact that these photographers are really just using trial-and-error. And perhaps more importantly, they give photographers the impression they’re using legitimate expertise, when in reality they’re just being boxed into a very limited framework.

And then viewers of these tutorials watch as a bonafide professional photographer - in fact, an ambassador for an internationally elite photography company - stumbles through the process of getting a satisfactory image capture over the course of a 30 minute video, which then greatly reinforces the idea that “this is just how things are done.”

But this kind of advice isn’t limited to the promotional tutorials put out by Canon and Profoto. It can be found pretty uniformly across the widely popular tutorials published on the blogs and Youtube channels of acclaimed professional photographers..….and on larger aggregate sites such as Fstoppers or Petapixel.

In fact, it’s on these kinds of forums where you’re most likely to encounter tutorials — professional tutorials, mind you, such as how to take bridal portraits, or how to shoot architectural interiors — in which honest-to-god industry pros advise their readers to just “fiddle around with their settings until the picture looks right.”

So before moving on, I’d like to add one final layer to all of this.

The only way it can possibly make sense to a photographer that “fiddling around with your settings” could ever be the best approach is if that photographer intends to make only the most simplistic or formulaic images.

Because.…….yes…….if you’re taking very simplistic, very formulaic images, then it can certainly be imagined that a few minutes of “trial and error” is a more practical solution than, say, spending several months studying and mastering every last nuance about the science of photography.

But any photographer with a more direct knowledge of the underlying components of the process will understand that not only can these techniques be handled more quickly when you shoot manually (way, way more quickly), but just as importantly, shooting more directly allows you to combine several photographic components and decisions in ways that could never reasonably be accomplished through “trial-and-erroring” your camera’s built-in solutions.

Which means these technologies not only slow photographers down, but they also place a very defined limitation on the overall complexity of their images.

So one important thing to keep in mind here is that this “industry standard” of taking very simplistic, very formulaic images is a seed that has largely been planted by the camera companies themselves.

In other words, these companies have set a standard for how professional images are “supposed to look,” based on what their own technologies are good at.

And then once that standard has been widely established — and once those images have become the norm throughout the industry — they can then advertise their own technologies as the very best path toward achieving those goals and standards.

Which means they’ve essentially loaded the question of “how photography works” so that they can provide their own preferred answer to that question. And their final sales pitch can perhaps best be summarized as follows:

“Look, there’s really no need to learn ‘photography’ — just learn our technology instead…..because our technologies can handle the very limited set of images that WE’VE established as being the “industry standard.” And then when those technologies fail - which will happen a lot - we’ll show you how to smooth over the edges with a bit of trial and error.”

And I can never decide which part of this is more appalling: that the camera industry continues to push these paradigms about photography….or that professional photographers continue to eat it up, seemingly without any awareness at all.

Either way, when you now hear professional photographers scoffing at the idea of, for instance, having to use an actual light meter in order to measure the light in their scenes (and almost all of them will scoff at that idea), ironically, those photographers think they’re signaling their own expertise, by insinuating: “Eh, if you really know what you’re doing you don’t actually need a light meter, you can just wing it.”

When in actuality, they’re signaling their lack of expertise by demonstrating how much they’ve bought into Canon/Sony/Nikon’s paradigm of taking extremely simplistic, formulaic images. They’re signaling that they’re wholly unaware that this medium can be used to create more sophisticated images than the repetitive formulas they’ve learned to mimic.

And so, yes, using trial and error makes perfect sense to them. Because when you get used to shooting the exact same kinds of simplistic images over and over and over again, then “just fiddling around with your settings for a minute” is indeed a viable approach.

But finally, getting back to these popular online tutorials, the real coup de grâce is always the part that comes next.

After watching a photographer spend upwards of 30 minutes stumbling their way toward a finished image, if the tutorial or video has been published on social media, it’ll almost certainly be accompanied by a cacophony of enthusiastic comments from other photographers exclaiming “Great tutorial! I learned so much!” …a statement which almost can’t possibly be true.

But due to the highly opaque and abstract nature of these technologies, it has become very difficult for aspiring photographers to know what’s real and what’s snake oil.

And the end-result here is that professional photographers routinely spend several minutes (and often 10-15 takes) trial-and-erroring their way to an image that a more knowledgeable photographer can achieve instantly, in just one try.

So in summary, the first real problem with the “Type B” approach is that it carries with it an almost comical level of inefficiency, as well as a frightening amount of trial and error.

Rather than be trained to understand the actual, inherent properties of photography that dwell beneath the surface of their technology, “Type B” photographers have instead been trained to recognize patterns and reference points on their camera’s interface — patterns and reference points that have been engineered FOR them, and then marketed TO them.

And that has made the process of photography unnecessarily indirect and abstract for them (and also painfully time-consuming).

But as mentioned before, the second and more important concern here is that this approach also leads to a lot of generic and simplistic images.

Why?

Well, to understand this part, we have to get back to that idea of “photographic variables.”

Algorithms hate variables. Because variables interfere with an engineer’s nicely laid plans.

For instance, if there’s a big difference in light within your scene (ie: if a scene has a lot of bright highlights AND dark shadows), then the algorithms that control your exposure are likely to become confused, as they won’t know which part of the scene to expose for, and you’ll begin chasing a chain reaction of corrective functions on your camera to get the exposure you want. 

Or if there are wildly different layers of space within your shot (ie: one thing is very near AND another thing is very far), the algorithms that deal with focus and depth of field will get confused, and you’ll begin chasing a chain reaction of corrective functions on your camera to get what you want.

And so, due to the fact that these algorithms are so easily confused by these kinds of variations, when it comes to STRATEGIZING an image, most photographers have actually been taught to avoid these variables altogether, because doing so greatly cuts down on the amount of misfires, and the amount of trial-and-error, that they’d have to endure. 

In other words, whereas someone who shoots manually, and more directly, can handle these kinds of variations very easily (recall my “changing lanes” analogy from earlier), on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you’re trapped within a limited system, one that was programmed via the assumptions of an engineer who isn’t even present at the time the picture is being made, then the only solution is to try to override the camera’s programming.

And then the insurmountable problem becomes that, due to how cumbersome and time-consuming each one of those override functions is going to be (and also how much trial and error they often require), at best, you’re only going to have time to overcome maybe one variable within your scene…if that.

And so these photographers have been taught to avoid those variables, to avoid that kind of complexity. They’ve been taught that if there are wildly different amounts of light, or wildly different layers of space, or a lot of movement throughout the scene, the camera's algorithms will continue to give them unpredictable and inconsistent results, and they’ll miss a lot of shots trying to correct for it.

Thus, much of what passes for conventional wisdom - in workshops and tutorials - stems from the need to eliminate these “inconvenient” variables. 

For instance, photographers like to repeat the advice that it’s best to shoot during the ‘golden hour,’ as opposed to at high noon. Or that, if you’re a portrait photographer, you should bring your subject into a shaded area to ensure very even lighting.

These have become almost unquestioned bits of “common wisdom,” or “rules-of-thumb,” within the industry.

And if you read between the lines, what this advice is really saying is “Avoid high contrast situations, because you’ll have to spend a lot of time and effort ‘correcting’ the camera.”

So whereas the more knowledgeable, more direct photographer understands that lighting differentials are what allow you to shift the emphasis of a photograph, or sculpt the shape of a photograph, or alter the mood of a photograph (which will all be demonstrated later in this piece)…these “Type B” photographers are actually being taught to avoid lighting differentials at all costs.

Perhaps the more biting way to put it is that, “the engineers who designed your camera politely ask that you not put anything in front of your lens that will foil their nicely laid plans to take your picture for you.”

So at the end of the day, if we put all of this together, “Type B” photographers are learning their methodology in two big steps:

Step 1: they spend several months learning their “tech,” getting to know their operating systems, and all of the various shooting modes and ‘advanced features’ on their cameras….and then,

Step 2: because those functions are so easily confused by any variables within the scene, they learn to avoid those variables almost entirely. Rather than elevate their abilities to meet the complexities of the scene, they learn to “dumb the scene down” to match the capabilities of their algorithms.

Or perhaps the even better way to put is that they first learn all of the functions that allow them to fight with their cameras, and then they learn that if they choose a simple enough scene, they won’t have to fight so much.

And as already noted, most of these photographers don’t know that this is what they’ve been taught, because these methods (and these technologies) have been wrapped so tightly in a veneer of technical jargon that “Type B” photographers truly believe they’re learning something sophisticated.

Part 5: The Images They Shoot

The upshot of all this is that “Type B” photographers stick to generic, fail-safe formulas that are explicitly designed to ensure that their camera’s programming will never get confused.

In other words, if you look at a lot of the more repetitive and formulated professional work that’s out there you can see this mindset on display. Because once professional photographers have bought into this algorithms-based approach, they’re all sort of stuck shooting the same images as everyone else. In fact, many of these photographers have near-identical portfolios.

For instance, every family photographer has the shot of the family sitting in a field of bluebonnets. Every food photographer has the overhead shot of the plate. Every senior portrait photographer has the shot of a teen in front of a brick wall. Etc.

And in looking at those images, consider that there’s a very logical reason these shots came to prominence. The lack of variables ensures that these are all formulas that allow professional photographers to bypass having to really understand the properties of the medium at all, because these are images that the generic algorithms of their cameras CAN handle, which in turn, allows them to learn their camera technology instead of learning the underlying properties of photography.

And one of the more prevalent consequences of all of this is that if all pro photographers shoot the same pictures, it forces them to compete with each other using primarily non-photographic skills.

So portrait photographers become adept at location-scouting, learning how to find the best gazebo, the best field of flowers, or the best railroad tracks. Wedding photographers develop their customer relations skills, becoming more adept at dealing with highly-stressed couples. Photographers of all varieties take classes on SEO optimization and online marketing.

Etc. Etc.

Because if “Type B” photographers can’t distinguish themselves through their shooting — and all of them have identical portfolios — then these more peripheral factors are likely to determine their success in the market. And so most professional photographers have been instructed to concentrate on these skills instead….almost exclusively…to the point that these more “supplemental” skills now monopolize the entirety of their education.

Which is why I now routinely meet pro photographers who’ve attended multiple workshops on portrait posing, or website management, and who can immediately regurgitate all of the talking points they picked up in each, but who don’t seem to understand even the most fundamental principles of how light works, or how lenses can be used to manage the spatial relationships in their scenes.

But returning to the shooting itself, in order to illustrate the different results that each of these approaches leads to, let’s more closely examine some apples-to-apples comparisons between pro photographers shooting the same kind of subject matter, but while using vastly different methodology.

And I’d like to begin by returning to that wedding comparison that initially kicked off this discussion.

I can now more clearly state that this first batch of images was shot with the ‘Type B’ methodology we’ve just outlined. And upon second viewing, it should be a lot more obvious now how these photographers have been taught.

Specifically, they’ve been taught a formula, one that was designed to avoid all major photographic variables, so that they can continue to use the smart-sounding camera features they learned about in their workshops:

…so they stage their scenes to be as flat, static, and evenly lit as possible.

And then, because that process can result in some fairly dry and simplistic images, many photographers will resort to spicing up the final outcome in ‘post,’ perhaps by adding some artificial color saturation (as has been done to the image in the lower right), or by using a pre-packaged filter effect, such as an artificial glow, or a vignette…not unlike the pre-packaged “filter” options you’ve probably seen in your Instagram app.

But it needs to be noted that post-processing software can’t really be used to re-structure the image - physically speaking. It can only be used to add an artificial veneer on top of the image you’ve already structured.

And moreover, artificially “spicing” an image can frequently cause it to look a bit cartoonish (again, note the image on the lower right). This is because if the proper photographic dynamics and variables truly did exist in the original scene, then those dynamics can easily be enhanced with post-processing…..but if they were never there to begin with, then adding them artificially can often defy our senses and expectations in some pretty unsettling and even silly ways.

For comparison, let’s now take a look at some Type A wedding photographers who instead look for scenes (or even create scenes) that legitimately have different amounts of light, disparate layers of space, and movement variables, in order that they may punctuate their images with a lot of emphasis and sentiment:

These photographers aren’t afraid of photographic variables; they‘re seeking them out and exploiting them. They see each variable as an opportunity to alter the structure of the image, which means each is an opportunity to “voice” the image with a more particular sentiment or energy.

Moreover, because these dynamics actually existed in the scene itself, if these photographers want to ENHANCE those dynamics with post-processing software, they certainly can.

However, let it be noted that: 1) It often isn’t necessary; in fact a good percentage of the student images in our ASOP Gallery haven’t been subjected to any post-processing at all, and 2) had these dynamics NOT existed in the scene, a lot of them would have been very difficult, or at least irrationally time-consuming, to fabricate using processing software.

The bottom line on post-processing is that creating the image in-camera, while the actual scene is still in front of you and at your disposal (as opposed to doing it with processing software, after-the-fact) is almost always faster and more efficient, and without exception ALWAYS provides you with more possibilities for how you can structure your shot.

But that’s the exact opposite of what pros are being taught.

They’re being taught to make quick, “generic” images in-camera, and then to do the “real work” later on using processing software.

And the incredibly specious logic they like to regurgitate in order to justify that approach is that, if you keep your “image capture” as generic as possible, then you can better enhance the image later on, maybe even take the image in 4 or 5 different final directions… whereas if you “commit” to a final result now, in-camera, you might not be able to “undo” it later.

Or to state their philosophy more concisely: “Surely 5 potential outcomes is greater than 1.”

And, I mean, who could argue with that, right?

So as a quick digression, let’s just stop and examine this premise for a minute. Because this particular premise - perhaps better than anything else - perfectly illustrates the kind of misunderstanding that inevitably arises when pro photographers learn a lot of “technology and jargon,” as opposed to learning photography.

What the pro photographers who espouse this philosophy clearly don’t understand is that the real-life physical variables that exist throughout your scene can be exploited and combined into hundreds of different image constructs, most of which will collapse entirely once you pull the trigger, and most of which then can’t be re-created in post-production.

So this means that at the actual moment of shooting — while still standing in the middle of your scene — there are literally hundreds of ways you can capture the image that might involve exploiting different variables in different combinations, and each one to different degrees. And the moment you pull the trigger, most of those possibilities vanish.

And while pro photographers (somewhat insanely) see this as an incentive to take the most generic picture possible, what they need to be taught to see instead is that if you want certain kinds of complex results, most of those results HAVE to be achieved in-camera, because they can’t be achieved through post-processing…..all of which more logically incentivizes you to put more substantial effort into your in-camera strategies.

Or to be a bit more specific, the way the physical process of photography works is this: depending on how many physical variables your scene has, you might have a matrix of 128, or even 256 structural possibilities. And nearly all of those constructs become unavailable to you once you pull the trigger on a totally generic image capture.

So given that knowledge, a more effective approach to the shooting process might look something like this: First, you survey your scene and recognize that there’s a very large set of possibilities for how you can structure/capture your shot. Next, you more selectively decide which possibility, or possibilities, you want, and which ones you don’t want. And then finally, even if you want to extract several different kinds of shots — or several different constructs — it takes only a few moments for a knowledgeable photographer to do so, in-camera.

Because it bears repeating that most of those constructs CAN’T be achieved by shooting a generic shot and then trying to re-work the image in post, which is to say, the most sophisticated structures quite factually have to be achieved in-camera.

So where “Type B” photographers have been taught to see their image capture strategy as “5 is greater than 1,” …..a more knowledgeable photographer will see it as “256 possibilities is greater than 5.”

Which is incredibly obvious to anyone who gives the matter even the slightest bit of thought.

But the fact that so many pro photographers (and seemingly all photography instructors) can’t see this logic indicates to me that they’ve never really questioned their training.

What most likely happened was this: when they were first learning their professional protocols via some kind of professional workshop, a very confident-sounding industry expert — ie: someone already well established within the industry — used a ton of esoteric and legitimate-sounding jargon to explain to them that if you defer all of your creative decision making to post, then you have 4 or 5 or 6 directions you can still take later on…….oh, and also, that’s what all “real pro photographers do.”

And upon hearing this argument, it all sounded logical enough.

And moreover, it was coming from the mouth of a confident authority figure (which is something those novice photographers were very much looking to become). So they didn’t feel the need to particularly question it at all. Instead they just immediately started regurgitating that same philosophy to anyone who would listen, so that they, too, could be perceived as an authority on the matter (“Bro, you should always center your histogram, you gotta capture as much pixel data as possible”).

But this notion that you should defer most of your creative decision-making to post-processing is an absolutely terrible paradigm, and it has probably done more to limit professional photographers than anything else we’re discussing on this page, as it means the vast, vast majority of image outcomes are entirely unavailable to any photographer who was simply taught, “make sure you always shoot in RAW so you can do tons and tons of post-processing later on.”

However it should probably be noted that this paradigm is profiting Adobe immensely.

Because while Adobe can claim no ownership over the ways the actual physical properties of your scene can be exploited and combined, they can claim ownership over the superficial “veneer” that their software allows you to overlay on top of your very generic image capture.

But back to our discussion. For our next comparison, let’s take a look at some Type B portrait photographers.

Once again, as with the last comparison, you’ll see that these pros are actively avoiding all photographic variables, which means their images are entirely reliant on only two factors: location and posing.

Further, note how even the location and posing have been neatly distilled into a series of repetitive formulas and clichés. So despite the staggering similarities you’re going to see in each row of images here, just know that every one of these images was shot by a different photographer:

So again, you can see that 100% of the work went into the location and posing. Which is to say all of the effort has been aimed at what to put IN FRONT OF the camera, and almost no effort has been aimed at what TO DO WITH the camera.

And this is because Type B photographers have spent their entire education concentrating almost exclusively on these more peripheral skills, and when it comes to the actual photography part of their job, in place of genuine photographic knowledge, they’ve really more just learned how to “manage” or “guide” their technology.

And in my experience, most of them don’t seem to know the difference.

From talking with them, it’s pretty clear that a lot of them even see the ‘photography’ part of the job as kind of a nuisance, something that just gets in the way of their posing and staging.

In other words, they see the photography part of the job as “a problem that needs to be managed,” rather than as an opportunity to do something creative.

So they learn to neutralize that part of the job as much as possible, by ridding their scenes of any photographic property that might obstruct their cameras, which in turn allows Canon/Sony/Nikon’s engineers to handle the actual photography part for them.

But now here are some portrait photographers who are embracing photographic variables. In fact, many of these photographers are even using studio lighting equipment in order to generate lighting differentials that were’t originally in the scene. This means not only are these photographers exploiting variables that were already present, but they’re also adding some additional variables that were’t:

So once again, the effects in these shots have been created through the exploitation of the very real variables these photographers have engineered into their scenes, which again, is much faster and more efficient than doing it in post-production (and many of these dynamics couldn’t really be faked with processing software anyway, particularly those involving spatial relationships).

Further, many of these photographers are still making use of the peripheral issues we discussed earlier (location and posing), it’s just that, on top of it, they’re also applying some photographic skills in order to express each subject with a distinct sensibility, style, or energy.

But just to speed things up a bit, let’s do a couple more quick, rapid-fire comparisons:

First, the vast majority of wildlife photographers use their cameras simply to SHOW us an animal, or to “point out” an animal:

Images like these are mostly just trying to “capture” what the human eye sees. They aren’t really trying to structure the image into any kind of expression, or narrative, about the subject.

Whereas “Type A” wildlife photographers use their understanding of spatial relationships and movement differentials in order to narrate the wildlife, or to create relationships, or to portray the wildlife with some kind of momentous sensibility:

Next, most professional pet photography is shot like this — from a distance, in perfectly even lighting, and with nothing moving:

When, with just the tiniest bit of effort, we can use Light, Space, and Time differentials to shoot it like this:

You get the idea.

The basic gist of these comparisons is that, in each case, the first batch is entirely characterized by avoiding photographic variables, while the second batch is entirely characterized by utilizing and embracing those variables.

And this is the secret ingredient most people can’t put their finger on when it comes to what they perceive as “better” or “more dramatic” or “more creative” photographs.

But again, I fear in going back and forth between these two categories it might give the false impression that these two philosophies are equally represented throughout the professional community.

They’re not. Not even close.

Which is why I need to reiterate that the overwhelming majority of professional photographers shoot the first way. Probably over 95% of the one’s I’ve met personally. Whereas the more innovative photographers represented in these “second batches” continue to operate in the extreme minority.

Worse, I’ve even found this to be true of most photographers who’ve been labeled “authorities” in this industry. And I’ve found it particularly true of photographers who’ve been tasked with teaching glamorous, high-priced workshops.

But getting back to these image comparisons, probably the biggest takeaway from all of this is that “Type B” photographers tend to structure their images the same way, no matter what the situation, and no matter what the subject.

In other words, they structure their pictures the same way whether they’re shooting portraits, sports, wildlife, or weddings:

There’s no distinct sensibility, style, or energy from shot to shot.

The most they ever seem to do, photographically, is use their lenses to blur the background a bit. But other than that, there’s almost no attempt to structure the image at all.

And yet we continue to classify these photographers in different categories - as “portrait” photographers, or “wildlife” photographers, or “sports” photographers….because the public is still so hung up on the subject of the photograph that they hardly notice these photographers all shoot the same way.

But our public would come to understand this medium a lot better if we were to classify these photographers in the same category, based on the fact that they’re all just dropping different subjects into the same template over and over again.

Because despite what these photographers have been taught, there are tons of different photographic constructs - and tons of different “tones of voice” - that a photographer can use in order to describe or articulate a given subject.

Which is why it needs to be understood that Type B photographers are neglecting every last bit of this medium’s potential in order to shoot all of their images in exactly the same generic way.

In fact, just to build upon that last point, I’d like to illustrate just a small sampling of the near-infinite set of potential constructs that can theoretically be applied to any photographic subject.

First, take a look at what we at ASOP refer to as the “atmospheric” tone of voice, which is a shooting style used regularly by more prestigious editorial outfits such as National Geographic and Texas Monthly magazine, marked by a distinctly soft contrast (usually 3-4 stops of contrast in very softly diffused light) that gives the image a sort of “contemplative” sensibility:

Next, you have the “gritty and gray” tone of voice, which documentary photographers often utilize because they feel it gives the scene a visceral, hardened sense of realism:

You also have the “Influencer” construct, wherein a subject is bathed in warm sunlight from behind, and then some of that sunlight is bounced back into the subject’s near side - preventing a silhouette - so that the viewer can properly identify the subject (or product being advertised):

Finally, you have the “cinematic” tone of voice, which is used by a lot of high end fashion and wedding photographers, and is marked by the mixing of ambient (naturally occurring) contrast with some artificially imposed studio lighting, and very often the utilization of multiple layers of space:

At a glance, this one may appear to have the same slick sense of drama as the “atmospheric / contemplative” tone illustrated above, but the difference is that, whereas the “contemplative” trope tends to utilize natural light in order to emphasize or even isolate the subject, the “cinematic” construct tends to use more conspicuously artificial lighting, and tends to be far more inclusive of the background environment, often creating an expansive narrative relationship between the foreground and background:

Again…there are tons of different voices or sentiments you could use to photographically describe a given subject.

And at ASOP we’ve identified dozens of well-developed photographic “tones of voice” that a photographer can use.

And moreover, we consider our absolutely highest goal to be the development of new ones.

But now back to these shots:

Not only are these photographers not developing any kind of innovative photographic voice, but they’re not even using the ones that have already been developed.

All of these images have been shot identically and generically - regardless of the subject matter, and regardless of what kind of sentiment the client may have wanted. Furthermore, these photographers don’t really use the medium in order to comment upon their subject, or to narrate their subject, or even to reference their subject against another part of the scene…...they’re just using their cameras in to SHOW us their subject.

And then finally, if the only real variable in their images is the literal subject itself, it incentivizes them to put all of their effort into that subject — ie: into posing the model, or plating the food — and no effort at all into developing their actual photography skills.

But it should be clear by now, from the comparisons above, that there is more than one way to structure a photograph. In fact, at ASOP, we have a name for this kind of generic “Type B” image structure….

Part 6: The “Brick-Wall-Overcast-Day”

My students and I refer to these templated “Type B” images as “brick-wall-overcast-day” images.

The term comes from a thought experiment we conduct in class, wherein we discuss the prospect of having to shoot a mural that’s been painted on the wall of a building, and further still, having to shoot it on an overcast day.

The gist of the thought experiment is that, in that kind of situation, you’d have no significant variables to work with. There’d be only one layer of space in the shot (a flat wall), there’d be no variations in light to exploit (because on an overcast day there’d be no shadows), and you’d have no movement or changing elements throughout the scene that would allow you to alter your timing or create any sense of active momentum.

Probably the most poignant way that I could describe the scenario is that if you placed five different photographers in front of that mural, all of whom might have wildly different styles and preferences, all five of those photographers would essentially have to take the same picture because there’d be almost no technical or structural decisions that could be made at all.

In other words, no distinction in “photographic voice” is even possible, because the inherent physical properties of the scene have FORCED all five photographers into using the same shooting strategy.

To be specific, in the hypothetical “mural shot” shown above, none of the five photographers would be able to shift their exposure, or “differentiate” their exposure in any way (because there’s only one amount of light in the scene to expose for)…..none of them would be able to shift their focus, or really anything at all about their spatial emphasis, because there’s only one layer of space in the shot….and there would be no incentive for any of them to alter their timing, or the length of the exposure, because nothing in the scene is moving or changing.

Thus, the most any of them could do to distinguish their images would be to frame (or compose) their shots a bit differently - which, incidentally, is something they could just do later on when they go to crop their final prints.

But they wouldn’t be able to express or assert their own unique photographic style — they wouldn’t be able to RE-STRUCTURE the shot — because the scene itself wholly disallows for it.

Which means that, as different as those photographers may be (and as different as their sensibilities may be), the scene itself has equalized or neutralized their sensibilities…and has forced all of them to shoot their images in the exact same style or “voice.”

So the term “brick-wall-overcast-day” is a metaphor for the most limited scene imaginable; a scene that totally neutralizes a photographer’s ability to distinguish their skills or their style, or to express themselves in any way at all….because there’s really only ONE RATIONAL WAY to take the picture.

In other words: YOUR picture of that mural will have to look like everyone else’s picture of that mural….because the properties of the scene have pre-determined it.

And at ASOP, the “brick-wall-overcast-day” parable is taught as something of a worst case scenario — something to avoid — in the hope that all of our students will come to grasp that such scenes offer no creative choices at all, no opportunity to differentiate your results from how someone else might have shot the same scene.

No opportunity to express your own voice, or your own personal worldview.

Which means the prevailing sentiment around our classroom is that, if you absolutely HAVE to shoot something like that….ok, fine. It happens. But you don’t want to volunteer that condition upon yourself; you don’t want to actively seek it out. You’d much rather hunt for a shot that offers you some kind of creative variability, a shot that’s far less “predetermined” …..a shot that allows you to make more unique and distinguishing creative decisions.

And it’s for that exact reason that maybe the most important lesson we ever preach around the ASOP studio is that, when you’re aligning your shot, you want to take great care to steer clear of any alignment that would ELIMINATE all photographic variables, because such an alignment will turn a perfectly fruitful scene — a scene with a large set of choices for how to express your subject matter — into a scene that now allows for only 1 rational expression.

It collapses a “flow chart” that has dozens of different landing spots into a flow chart with only one landing spot.

And for us, that would be the greatest sin you could commit as a photographer. And as such, we reinforce that value at every turn in our curriculum.

We teach our students that when you align your scene with a more dynamic “flow chart” of possibilities, one with dozens and dozens of “landing spots,” it allows you to choose a more unique final expression.

But now imagine that Type B photographers have been taught the exact opposite value.

Type B photographers have been specifically taught to seek out “brick-wall-overcast-day” scenes, and if they can’t find one, they’ve been taught to approximate one by aligning the scene in such a way so as to eliminate (or neutralize) all photographic variables.

And the reason they’ve been taught to do this is because aligning a scene so that there is only one rational way to take the picture (ie: collapsing the shot’s flow chart down to only 1 “landing spot”) makes it a lot easier for camera companies to predict how you’ll shoot, which in turn makes it a lot easier for them to program the camera.

It’s basically a symbiosis that works like this:

If photographers always align their scenes in this one very predictable way — and therefore camera companies always know exactly how you’re going to shoot your images in advance — then it helps those camera companies more accurately design their algorithms. And then in turn, those more “dialed-in” algorithms help “Type B” photographers more efficiently capture this exact kind of image.

So from a distance, it appears these photographers and camera engineers are working together, maybe even helping each other out.

But the problem is this is a symbiosis in which only one side of that equation is actually conscious of the arrangement. Most pro photographers have no earthly idea that this is the agreement they’ve entered into.

Instead, they’ve merely cobbled together dozens of tidbits of advice, and several esoteric technical “solutions,” and now they simply think “this is how photography works.”

And in the grander scheme of things, this is an arrangement that benefits camera companies far more than it benefits photographers.

And the end result is that Type B photographers are sacrificing every ounce of creative decision-making the scene has provided, all so they can appease the engineers who designed their operating systems, and continue to use the camera features that the industry has told them to use.

So while we at ASOP strenuously and adamantly warn our students against the dangers and pitfalls of accidentally giving your scene a “brick-wall-overcast-day” alignment….camera companies and Youtube channels are out there propagandizing the virtues of it.

But finally, in order to put this entire distinction into a more tangible illustration, I’d like to go ahead and demonstrate the primary arc of development that my own students undergo, which should help to provide a stark contrast to how “Type B” photographers typically learn.

My own students (who are mostly amateurs, by the way) embark upon what is essentially a 3-step learning process, and one that takes only a few months to complete.

They first begin - like most people - with images that resemble these:

…wherein they pick a subject they think is interesting, and then they merely try to SHOW us that subject.

And like most beginners, in this earliest stage, they’re thinking more in terms of “how do I use my camera functions in order to GET my exposure” or “what buttons do I press to GET the correct focus?”

They aren’t thinking “how can I SHIFT my exposure,” or “how can I USE spatial emphasis?” Most of them are still working from the assumption that their job is merely to show us the subject they’ve picked out.

But then they learn that those properties CAN be shifted, and that their images can be restructured and re-articulated, and that, in doing so, you can change what the image says about the subject. However, they also learn that, in order to do so, you have to prioritize seeking out the variables in your scene that directly enable you to re-structure your photograph.

So the next step in the process is that they learn how to seek, align, and exploit those variables….one at a time.

So for instance, they learn that if they can re-align their shot so that there is a substantial light differential within the composition, then they can do something like this:

That’s the same exact scene in both images, it’s just that the first shot has been aligned in such a way that there are no substantial lighting variables within our composition (ie: 95% of the scene falls within the same amount of light), whereas the bottom shot has been aligned so that there is a very obvious lighting differential (the flag is lit differently than the environment behind it).

Thus, only the bottom shot gives us any sort of choice in exposure (ie: we can expose for the flag, or we can expose for the houses in the background, or we can expose somewhere in-between).

Which means only the bottom alignment gives us any OPTIONS.

So if we want, we can convert the image into a glowing, archetypal depiction of “‘Old Glory’ emerging from darkness.”

If we want.

But we could also express the scene as a 6-inch flag planted innocuously in someone’s flower bed.

If we want.

The core idea here is that we’ve generated two very different DEPICTIONS of the same subject, and importantly, that kind of authorship can only be enacted when you have a CHOICE in how to structure the image.

But consider again that the original alignment of the scene allows for only one rational choice in exposure, because 95% of the composition falls in the same amount of light. There’s no significant lighting variable to act upon.

And now, finally, to reiterate the main point here, recall that “Type B” photographers have actually been trained to seek that first shot instead, they’ve been taught to seek - and to value - a composition wherein “one exposure fits all,” ….because if there’s only one way to expose the shot, then your camera’s algorithmic responses can’t accidentally choose the wrong exposure and disrupt your photoshoot.

Ok, but next, as an example of an entirely different kind of photographic variable, our students learn that if they re-align their shot so that there are substantial spatial disparities, they can do something like this:

Once again, we’re working with the same exact scene for both images, we’ve just re-aligned the shot so that it has more extreme spatial variations (in other words, something is now very near and something else is now very far, whereas in the first shot everything in the scene was “relatively far”), which in turn allows us to use our lens to create a ‘hierarchy of information,’ leading the viewer’s eyes from the foreground into the background.

And continuing with our theme here, note that the upper image utilizes a more “brick-wall-overcast-day” alignment of the scene — because if there aren’t any extreme spatial disparities in the shot then we’re achieving a scenario wherein “one focus fits all” or even “one type of lens fits all.”

Whereas, conversely, the bottom alignment provides enough spatial disparity that we can now use our lens to shift focus, shift depth of field, and shift scalar relationships (or all three if we want).

Again, we now have choices. Which in turn allows us to change how the viewer reads the scene.

We could also use a time variable:

Again, “brick-wall-overcast-day” photographers want a scene wherein “one shutter speed fits all,” or “one timing fits all.”

You get the idea.

And during this stage of development, students are learning to value these variables rather than to avoid them. They’re seeing that if they can work just one single variable into their shot, it opens the door for them to make massive structural changes to their image.

But it’s the next step where this gets much more complex (and fun!). In the next step, students learn that if they can COMBINE these variables (in other words, if they can make it a priority to seek out multiple variables to work into the same shot), then they’ll have infinitely more structural possibilities to choose from.

Specifically it works like this:

They discover that aligning just one single variable within your shot can give you as many as 3-6 possibilities (3-6 choices) for how to structure your image.

But aligning two variables in your shot can give you as many as 16-35 choices.

Aligning three variables? Well….now the sky’s the limit.

And the greater conclusion that begins to materialize is this:

As a photographer, you absolutely WANT to maneuver yourself into having more photographic decisions to make. You want to maneuver yourself into having a more dynamic “flow chart” of structural possibilities — a flow chart that will provide you with dozens of different possible outcomes. Because you can then use that flow chart to DISTINGUISH your image from how other photographers might have shot the same scene.

Doing that - as opposed to aligning the shot so there is one and only one structural possibility - is what leads to more unique results, a more refined photographic style, and a more dialed-in photographic “voice.”

So toward the end of their development, they’re building an organized mental framework that allows for them to combine these techniques into more sophisticated image structures, or more sophisticated photographic voices…until eventually, their shooting starts to look like this:

And all of these images were shot using exclusively manual functions — with no dependence at all on any unique camera features or algorithms — and, just as importantly, no dependence whatsoever on post-processing [Note: the ones that have a bit of a “surreal” veneer were also achieved in-camera, but with the use of artificial lighting equipment as opposed to post-processing software].

And throughout that entire process my students are really learning two very important aspects of photographic expertise:

First, they’re learning to recognize and to understand all of the individual “elements of photographic structure.” One at a time.

And then, second, they’re learning how to combine and manipulate those elements to the point that they can fully control the structure and articulation of their shots.

But the bizarre reality we’re living in is that most ‘pro’ photographers never develop beyond that very first stage.

Seriously. They never progress beyond shooting “brick-wall-overcast-day” images.

Instead, they spend their entire careers using pre-programmed technology that was designed to “capture” the very basic kinds of images illustrated in that first step:

…and then, as a substitute for legitimate photographic knowledge, they learn to take these kinds of image captures and dress them up the best they can using post-processing software.

So they use Lightroom to increase the color saturation or sharpness, or they add an artificial glow, or some extremely fake-looking contrast.

And then the final step is that they’re taught to focus most of their professional efforts on non-photographic skills such as posing/plating/location etc. Because that allows them to retro-fit their professional strengths to accommodate this totally superficial methodology.

I frequently go for walks in and around the downtown Austin area during the sunset hour, and whenever I approach any of the city’s more iconic or more naturally-beautiful hotspots, there are always at least a half-dozen photographers milling about, taking family portraits and engagement photos.

And the reason they’re all there at the same time is that they’ve all been taught to wait for the exact moment in the day when the sun has just gone down - but when there’s still just that tiny bit of light left in the atmosphere - because that particular 30 minute timeframe offers the most even lighting possible.

In other words, it ensures there will be absolutely no differentials in the atmosphere whatsoever, and they can therefore persist in using their program functions.

For the record, most of them use “Aperture Priority Mode,” along with a few override functions, such as “Exposure Compensation” and “Bracketing.” And then after a few takes they check their histograms to see if the image “came out.”

And then rather than see that methodology for what it is — aka: letting the camera’s algorithms take the picture for you, and then smoothing over the results with a little bit of trial and error — they’ve honestly been taught to see this method as a “knowledgeable,” professional approach.

By the same token, hardly a day goes by that I don’t stumble upon a photographer holding a fashion shoot in one of the various alleyways on Austin’s east side, with the model composed so that he or she is flush up against the wall of the alley:

[*note the artificial “contrast” filter that’s been added to the shot at the upper left - via post-processing software. As there wasn’t an actual light differential in the scene, the best any post-processing software can do here is to sort of cartoonishly darken or ‘blacken’ all of the edges throughout the shot]

In fact, this last one is maybe the most common type of photo shoot I ever encounter.

And I have to imagine those fashion photographers think that the “alleyway fashion trope” was born out of a desire for urban grittiness, or an edgy sensibility, when the ACTUAL point of origin for that formula stems from the fact that placing a model flush against the wall of an evenly-shaded alleyway quite literally achieves the brick-wall-overcast-day structure, which, once again, allows them to shoot with their generic program functions, and without any serious knowledge about photography at all.

And in any of these scenarios it’s always quite disheartening to watch as these photographers put on a pretentious disposition of authority, confidently directing their clients in one pose or another…fully convinced they’ve mastered their craft. Meanwhile, they’re all adhering to a formula that was specifically engineered for them, in order that they can avoid having to make any real photographic decisions at all.

In other words, it would not at all be an unfair or inaccurate description of their process to state that:

1) A group of engineers (whom these photographers have never met) designed a system of algorithms that evaluate all of the technical aspects of the scene FOR THEM (ie: the amounts of light, the distances involved, etc.), and then that same technology quickly strategizes how those technical aspects should be handled.

And then:

2) A group of industry leaders (whom these photographers have also never met) devised a set of formulaic cliches, locations, and poses that might work well from WITHIN the very limited confines of that system.

Thus, the photographers who shoot these images have played absolutely no role in how any of that paradigm was devised or developed. Which means that 95% of the creativity that goes into their shots has been predetermined for them, by people they’ve never met, before they’ve even picked up a camera.

And I’m genuinely not sure they’re even aware of that.

They truly seem to believe that choosing what specific subject to drop into that template is enough of a creative decision to call their pictures “their own.” And to a person, they all seem to believe that learning the features of their cameras, and some peripheral aspects of the industry, makes them an “expert photographer.”

And I think one very clear conclusion that we can draw from all this is that if you lure a photographer into obsessing over the ‘peripherals’ of the job, then the fact that they’re all shooting the exact same image structures genuinely won’t even occur to them.

And so countless photographers have become trapped within this methodology, having memorized formulas that keep them dependent on their camera’s interface, and that make them far less capable of innovating or adapting.

And then, rather than improve the fundamentals of their photography, they OBSESS over peripheral issues (my absolute personal favorite is how “tack sharp” the image is), because, based on the way that they’ve been trained, those are the only parts of the process they can use to distinguish their work from all the other photographers who shoot in exactly the same way that they do.

And perhaps the most irrational part of all of this is that it takes just as long to learn this approach as it does to learn how to shoot with legitimate, structural, photographic skills.

But the hidden dynamic within all of this (which will be much more thoroughly explored in the next section) is that learning genuine photographic skills doesn’t really profit Canon, Sony, or Adobe in any way, so they don’t especially advocate doing it. It’s much more profitable for those companies if photographers think that getting “good images” depends more upon using algorithms, camera features, and post-processing software.

So that’s what they advocate instead.

And these companies are by far the loudest authority on “how photography works.”

The result, in this case, is that one of the likeliest groups of shooters to have acted as leaders and innovators, and who might have pushed the medium to new heights…isn’t pushing this medium at all.

In fact, it’s all quite the opposite. Most professionals now practice a mode of photography that actually holds the medium back.

So to concisely summarize this entire section:

On one end of the spectrum, “Type A” photographers are learning:

1) All of the individual physical properties of this medium that allow you to re-structure your photograph (independent of the the technology you’re using).

2) How to seek out and exploit each one of those individual properties, and then how many ways each one can be exploited.

3) Then they learn how to COMBINE those properties into more unique and more sophisticated image structures, so that you can more purposefully “dial in” your image to reflect the exact intentions of your photoshoot, and so that you can more uniquely express what you want to express, visually.

4) Finally, they learn the full logic behind why some image constructs suit certain purposes better than others, as well as a total understanding of which constructs are at your disposal if you want to communicate one idea as opposed to another.

In other words, they’re acquiring a total fluency in the visual logic of how and what a photographic image can communicate…..as well as a full understanding of how the underlying PHYSICS of photography can be used to re-articulate an image……regardless of what specific technology you choose to use.

Whereas, on the other end of the spectrum, most “professional” photographers are learning:

1) The unique proprietary abstractions that have been built into their specific brand of camera - ie: all of the “bells and whistles” Sony uses in their operating system as opposed to the “bells and whistles” Canon uses in theirs. **And with very little knowledge of what’s happening underneath that technical interface.

2) Next, they learn how to align their shots as “brick-wall-overcast-day” shots so that their camera’s “bells and whistles” can more easily handle the physics of the scene.

3) Then, once they’ve confined themselves to that very limited framework, they learn to stick to a formulaic set of locations, poses, and cliches that have proven to work well from within that limited framework …..All of which results in a portfolio of images that are near-identical to what their colleagues are shooting.

4) They then learn how to use Adobe’s proprietary software to “spice the image up” in post-processing, which gives them a very limited set of superficial, surface-level ways to separate their final results from their colleagues. **Mind you, they can’t really use that software to re-structure the image, physically - in the ways that have been demonstrated above - the best they can do is to lay an artificial veneer ON TOP of the “brick-wall-overcast-day” structure that they’ve already shot.

5) Lastly, they learn that success within the industry has little to do with your actual photography skills (because your colleagues have all been taught the same formulas that you’ve been taught) so they focus on mastering the industry’s more peripheral skills in order to out-compete their colleagues at the business level.

In summary, professional photographers aren’t really learning anything about “photography” ….they’re really just learning their ‘technology,’ and then they’re learning a lot of industry norms and expectations that can be delivered through that technology….and from those two things alone they’re able to cobble together a lucrative enough career that they hardly feel the need to question any of this.

Finally, if one of those approaches sounds vastly, inherently superior to the other, well, yes….clearly.

But here’s the bad news: Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Adobe are increasingly doing everything within their power to disincentivize the “Type A” approach altogether, making it increasingly more difficult and more inconvenient to practice photography that way at all, simply because that “Type A” approach undermines the very complex, very profitable business model they’ve spent decades refining.

So, if thus far this discussion has largely been an illustration of the problems that are currently plaguing the photo industry, I’d like to use the remaining sections of this essay to assign some specific blame for all this, before offering a potential solution.

Part 7: How We Got Here - The Profitability of Algorithms

Ok, so if this “Type B” approach to photography is so grossly inefficient, and leads to such dull and formulaic images, then how did this approach get to be so popular, particularly among professionals?

This is an important question.

Several factors got us to this point, but let's begin with the culpability of the camera companies themselves, because they’ve indeed played the most active and conscious role in all this.

For about the first century of its existence, the practice of photography was dependent upon the photographer having a solid understanding of the physics they were capturing - ie: knowing how light works, how distance affects the image, how angles of movement might affect the image, etc. 

But during the mid-20th Century, in an effort to make photography more accessible to the general public (which is a good thing), engineers were charged with the task of TRANSLATING those physics onto a camera’s interface, which meant creating a series of buttons and icons that the typical consumer might be able to understand.  

Naturally their first efforts were clumsy and ineffective, as those initial functions couldn't account for every variable in the image, and so amateurs were still getting unpredictable results. 

So they began amending the translation, making the interface more complicated, with more options and more abstractions for how you can affect your image THROUGH the camera's interface.

And if you can imagine that kind of evolution unfolding for a couple more decades, then by about the 1990's we had gotten to a point where learning how to approximate, or "fudge" the picture, using several of the features on the camera's interface, was genuinely more complicated and more convoluted than simply learning the actual science of the medium. 

Truly.

  But by that point, the common citizen couldn't really tell the difference.

Because to the completely uninitiated beginner, whether someone is talking about the physics of light and spatial relationships - very directly - or someone is talking about using your ‘exposure compensation tool‘ in order to move your ‘histogram,’ it all sounds like some kind of esoteric, technical jargon. It all sounds equally complicated.

And the strong irony here is that most photographers now spend just as many months learning a proprietary translation of photography as they would spend if they were learning the actual science of photography directly. However, the difference is, when they get to the end of that tedious process, they don’t have an adaptable, universal knowledge of photography, one that would carry them through ANY situation they encounter…instead, they have a much more singular, limited process, one that doesn’t at all enable them to handle every kind of situation they might encounter - only the situations their algorithms have been designed to handle - which simultaneously traps them within one single style of shooting, while also keeping them entirely dependent on Canon/Nikon/Sony’s interface.

Ok, so this partially explains how we got here: that it was initially under good intentions that camera companies tried to make photography more accessible to the mass public, but then the process just sort of spiraled out of control.

However, that isn’t quite the whole story.

Because at some point along that timeline, this dynamic gradually drifted toward being a much more conscious and more coercive strategy on the part of the camera companies.

See, as operating systems expanded and became more complicated, the marketing teams at Canon/Nikon/Sony quickly realized that it was more profitable to be able to control not just the physical tools for practicing this medium (ie: the apertures and shutters), but also the algorithms that tell a photographer what to do.

In other words, they discovered that designing an operating system that can control the assumptions for HOW an image should be shot can actually influence the behavior of photographers.

They also discovered that encouraging photographers to be dependent on their own proprietary algorithms is far more lucrative than encouraging photographers to shoot manually and independently of the interface they’ve designed for them.

In fact, just as an aside, if all photographers did shoot manually, there really wouldn’t be much incentive to prefer one brand over another, because most cameras essentially share the same internal mechanics. What varies from camera to camera is mostly just the “operating system” that was designed to govern those mechanics — ie: all of the unique terms and icons built into the camera’s interface, and all of the algorithms that opaquely strategize the image for you.

Thus, if you're shooting manually and more directly, you’re mostly just bypassing that operating system anyway, which means that, with a very few nuanced exceptions, pretty much any interchangeable-lens camera will do.

So in short: these companies found that there was a tremendous set of advantages to building their business model around the camera’s operating system, as opposed to the physical mechanics of the camera itself. And they’ve run with that strategy ever since.

One of the very first advantages they discovered was that when they heavily promote the idea that their own unique operating system “will improve your photography," it allows them to differentiate their cameras from their competitors.

So whereas in 1968, when cameras had only a few manual dials on them, it truly didn’t matter whether you used a Nikon or a Canon as the two companies were producing nearly identical products…today Nikon can argue that their algorithms are smarter than Canon's, and Canon can argue that their algorithms are smarter than Nikon's.

The second advantage to this strategy is that if professional photographers believe the quality of their work is dependent upon their camera’s operating system, then they might also believe that the best way to improve their shooting would be to upgrade to the latest technology [“Now with even smarter algorithms!!!”] every time a new update is released.

And this keeps photographers on the hook for more routine purchases of new technology. Whereas manual photographers who don’t depend on any algorithms at all have no need to purchase new equipment until their cameras physically break down on them.

And then we come to the biggest advantage of all: if photographers spend several years building their entire understanding of photography (along with their practical muscle memory) around one particular operating system, then those photographers are far less likely to switch brands, because doing so would mean having to learn an entirely new system, and an entirely new muscle memory.

And this keeps photographers remarkably brand-loyal.

In fact, just to illustrate how effective this last strategy is, let’s make a quick analogy to the automobile industry.

As it stands now, if a person learns to drive in a Honda Civic, they shouldn’t have any problem driving a Toyota Corolla, or a Volkswagon Jetta, should the need suddenly arise. Which is why, despite the average person’s insistence about which car brand they prefer to own, when that same person arrives at an unusually chaotic airport car rental counter — perhaps on a very busy holiday weekend — and is informed that the rental company has only 1 vehicle remaining….. well, all of that pickiness suddenly subsides, and they’ll be happy to take whatever vehicle is available.

But now imagine a world in which the auto industry is totally de-regulated (ie: cars are no longer required to conform to certain safety regulations and can be built in any way the manufacturer wants).

If that were to occur, it would take exactly 5 seconds for Toyota and Honda to figure out that they can make their customers a lot more brand-loyal if they design their cars to be as different from each other as possible.

So whereas cars are normally designed with the accelerator on the right and a brake pedal on the left, in this alternate reality, Honda decides to put their brake pedal on the right, and their accelerator on the left. Toyota in turn decides that, instead of a traditional steering wheel, they’ll install some sort of “smart joy stick” for steering. BMW decides to put the driver’s seat on the right side of the car instead of the left.

The advantage to this strategy is that it would coerce drivers into sticking with the same brand of car — probably for life — because absolutely no one would want to have to re-establish an entirely new muscle memory for driving.

Which means that, in that world, yes, absolutely, whenever a person arrived at a busy airport rental counter, they would be totally adamant that they have to have a Toyota, because no one would want to merge onto a highway, at 75mph, in a car with a completely unfamiliar set of controls.

And this is more or less what Canon and Sony have figured out. That engineering a lot of unnecessary differences into their cameras keeps customers a lot more brand-loyal. 

Which means a good portion of the illogical and counter-intuitive clutter that’s been added to our operating systems wasn’t put there for good reason (because it might IMPROVE your photography), it was put there simply because it was the opposite of what the other companies were doing.

So in the end, Nikon/Canon/Sony's profitability doesn't depend so much on making the best camera, their profitability depends on adding "features" to their operating system that will DIFFERENTIATE their cameras from other brands (ie: features that will create a more distinct “brand identity”)…….and more importantly, features that will ABSTRACT the process of photography into a framework that they can have more exclusive control over.

That is their true business model.

And one ancillary benefit to making their products very “feature heavy” is that it expands their market beyond that of just serious photographers, allowing them inroads with the so-called “technophile” consumer (people who don’t necessarily care deeply about photography, but are generally fond of purchasing new gadgets and technologies).

They also appeal to the writers of consumer tech blogs, who give cameras good reviews based almost exclusively on what new “features” have been added to the operating system (after all, how else are they going to review a new camera? If you shoot manually, what improvements can Nikon really make to their shutter?).

And so consumer review platforms begin to piggyback and profit from the advent of new proprietary technology as well, as they delight in being able to unpack and explain all of the newest operating system features to the consuming public, adding even more unnecessary layers to this increasingly bloated Photography Industrial Complex.

But the single most important thing to keep in mind about all this is that anyone who practices photography manually - and more directly - is sidestepping this business model entirely.

And these companies are very, very, very well aware of that.

So just to be as clear as possible, I want to spell out the exact reasons manual photographers are sidestepping this entire paradigm, and in turn, how that eats into the profit potential for these companies:

1) Manual photographers don’t really need to care what brand of camera they use. They might have some superficial, ergonomic preferences, but they aren’t at all dependent on any algorithms for their shooting, which means whatever camera you put in their hands, they just look for the manual controls and they’re ready to go. Further, in sidestepping all proprietary algorithms and solutions, they don’t need to worry that different brands might give them different results, because they can get the same results using any manual camera at all. Finally, they also won’t be thrown by an unfamiliar interface, or a uniquely different operating system, because they’re mostly BYPASSING and ignoring that operating system anyway. And all of this makes them infinitely less brand loyal…or at least much less likely to become obsessed with one brand over another. Which makes these photographers terrible customers in the eyes of Canon/Sony/Nikon.

2) Manual photographers aren’t easily won over by shiny new “features,” which makes them somewhat impervious to marketing. Given that their actual results are not dependent on any specific proprietary technology, manual photographers don’t especially care what new features have been added to the latest operating systems, and are therefore far less susceptible to the kind of marketing rhetoric that these companies depend on. In fact, pretty much all of Canon/Sony/Nikon’s marketing is oriented toward new proprietary “features and solutions,” as there have been almost no major upgrades to a camera’s physical, manual features in over a century now.

3) Manual photographers don’t ever need to purchase the very highest priced camera. This is because once you get into any specific class of camera (ie: any specific “build” or “format” of camera), from there, any increase in price is generally triggered by all the extra algorithms and features they’ve installed. And with a few rare exceptions, most of those features are completely irrelevant to anyone who shoots manually.

4) Manual photographers don’t need to upgrade their equipment nearly as often. In fact, many manual photographers will shoot with the same camera for a decade. Whereas photographers who are more dependent on their features and algorithms often feel like they need to “trade up” every year or two.

So in short, manual photographers (or “Type A” photographers) buy cheaper cameras on average, they tend to hold on to them for several extra years before finally repurchasing a newer version, and then on top of all of that, they aren’t particularly brand loyal. They could switch brands at any time with the slightest incentive.

Whereas “Type B” photographers are the opposite in every way.

They see owning the very most expensive camera as an important status symbol, or as a signifier of legitimacy (and their constant bragging about it serves as a tremendous source of free advertising for these camera companies).

Next, they re-purchase or upgrade their cameras at a rate that ensures they’ll own probably 3 or 4 times as many camera bodies over the course of their careers compared to “Type A” photographers.

And finally, and maybe most importantly, they are fanatacally brand loyal.

Which means the bottom line here is that Type B photographers are infinitely more profitable to these manufacturers.

In fact, so much so that there’s almost no chance that these companies haven’t already profiled and taxonomized these two types of clientele even more thoroughly than I have on this page (their market research teams have had the better part of 50 years to do so).

And the upshot here is that, not only do these companies cater to the ‘Type B’ mindset, but they’ve set themselves about the task of aggressively fostering and perpetuating that mindset. Because analytically and mathematically speaking, their “peak” business model would be to convert every last photographer on the planet into a Type B photographer.

Think of it this way: if we return for a moment to our earlier comparison between photographers and concert cellists, consider that cello manufacturers don’t especially care what specific pieces of music you want to play. Whether you fancy Beethoven Quartets or whether you want to adapt some popular Metallica songs, they have very little vested interest in it either way.

They’re more concerned with the acoustical design of the cello, or its durability.

Things like that.

They aren’t particularly interested in coercing concert cellists toward one musical philosophy as opposed to another. Because their job, as they see it, is to provide cellIists with the best physical instrument possible, and then musicians can take that instrument and use it however they want.

And I suspect camera companies were much the same way 50 years ago.

But not anymore.

Twenty-first Century camera companies have a strong, vested interest in what kinds of pictures you take, and how you take them. The most refined, sophisticated business strategy for a modern camera company is to convert every new and emerging photographer into being lifelong and loyal “Type B” photographer.

So with all of that in mind, just as a quick thought experiment, let’s consider what would happen if we waived a magic wand, and suddenly every photographer in the world woke up tomorrow shooting manually and more directly. What would happen?

One thing it would do is completely obliterate Canon/Sony/Nikon’s business model.

To what degree?

It’s hard to say exactly, but we’re not talking small margins here. I’m guessing their profits would decrease by at least 50%, minimum.

When you take into account the millions of “serious” photographers worldwide who constantly and unnecessarily upgrade their equipment (buying 3 or 4 expensive camera bodies in the same span that a manual photographer might only buy 1)… and then when you further take into account the millions of amateurs worldwide who are duped into buying the $900 camera model instead of the $500 model, for the sole reason that it has a lot of extra “features” that are totally useless to a manual photographer… it might even be considerably more than that.

And the point here is that there is absolutely zero chance that a multi-billion dollar, global industry isn’t aware of that dynamic.

None.

It’s their responsibility - their due diligence - to be aware of that.

And in being aware of that, it becomes in their very best interest to outwardly influence and finesse these dynamics to their advantage (and exactly how they’re influencing those dynamics will be the topic of our next section).

However, before we tumble into some borderline inflammatory rhetoric, I want to make it clear that we’re not talking conspiracy theory here.

This is just basic economics.

This is what happens when your entire industry gets in bed with a multi-billion dollar, consumer-driven marketplace. These companies would say that they’re just executing a sensible business strategy, because if they don’t, they won’t be able to compete in a marketplace that already houses 4 or 5 strong competitors, nor satisfy their obligations to their shareholders. And in the very worst of scenarios, if they don’t fully maximize their profits they may lose their competitive balance and legitimately risk going under.

Therefore, the contention of this essay is not so much that this situation is all just one giant, evil conspiracy; the contention of this essay is that photography seems to be the only significant form of “professional expertise” that’s been exclusively tied to the whims and incentives of consumer marketing.

And because that’s what’s happened, absolutely none of what’s transpired here should come as a surprise to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how large businesses operate. These companies’ highest priority — as consumer-facing entities — is to be as profitable as they can be, and to be as situationally aware and in control of these dynamics as they can be.

No, the surprise comes when you look to the pro photography community (whose members are supposed to be the “experts” here) and you realize that no one seems to even notice any of this. They’re all too busy gushing about the cool new features Sony and Nikon have added to their operating systems.

Part 8: It’s Getting Worse…Much Worse (or “Why I’m writing this Article”)

[Note: please excuse the more personal tone of this section, as I shall now begin addressing the very particular set of dynamics that have emerged (and worsened) in recent years that are all but forcing me to speak out against the industry. In light of this, this section is going to be somewhat more “anecdotal” than previous ones]

Much of this was already true twenty years ago. But in very recent years, these companies have become noticeably (and alarmingly) more aggressive in their efforts to manipulate the behavior of photographers.

As an instructor, I’ve had to become intimately familiar with every operating system on the market, from Canon and Nikon SLR’s, to Sony and Fujifilm mirrorless cameras, because I tend to see every one of those systems on a near-daily basis.

And fifteen years ago, it could be said that a camera’s manual functions and a camera’s program functions coexisted reasonably well on most operating systems, which is to say that photographers could opt into either approach without a terrible amount of frustration.

Because the operating systems on most cameras didn’t actively discourage the use of manual functions.

But that all started to change in the early part of the 2010’s. Around that time it became increasingly common for newer cameras to be set, by factory default, to a lot of very intrusive automatic functions, and the user was suddenly required to dig pretty deep into the camera’s operating system if they wanted to OPT OUT of those functions.

And at first, this was mostly just a minor irritation. It basically meant that any student enrolled in one of my courses had to spend an extra 10 minutes disabling a lot of the overbearing factory presets on their cameras.

But in the past couple of years, this phenomenon has gone completely off the rails. Camera companies have taken to hiding a lot of very essential manual functions on their cameras so that they’re near-impossible for a student to find without my assistance. Meanwhile, the automatic functions - ie: the functions that override everything you do - are set by default at the factory to be as paternalistic and intrusive as possible, and the shutoff switches for those functions are becoming increasingly more hidden and harder to find.

So just to be clear, the escalation I’ve witnessed over the course of my career has been that these companies have gone from offering photographers the mere OPTION of using their programmed solutions…..to then designing their interfaces so that they aggressively ADVISE photographers to use their programmed solutions…..to now outright coercing, tricking, and sometimes MANDATING that photographers use their programmed solutions.

And just to illustrate what this means a bit more tangibly, if you’re a student in one of my courses and you want to ensure that your camera is entirely under your own control, what used to be a relatively minor inconvenience of having to spend maybe 10 minutes unpeeling your camera’s operating system and deactivating a few rogue functions, has now devolved into a 4-6 week headache of constantly having to dig through your menu system - at nearly every juncture in the curriculum - in order to disable whatever intrusive, paternalistic programing is currently interfering with the task at hand.

In fact, students will often toggle every visible option on their cameras to “manual,” only to find that their images are still coming out in bizarre and unpredictable ways. And to remedy the problem, we usually have to resort to doing an online search to find whatever hidden algorithm is disrupting their shooting.

And consider the frustration that a total beginner must feel when they put immense amounts of effort into absorbing the factual principles of photography….only to keep hitting roadblocks - through no fault of their own - due to the intentionally adversarial programming of their cameras.

It’s become a near-daily occurrence that I have a student who is deeply engaged in our class discussion, making eye-contact, nodding along to everything I’m saying, all in a very clear effort to keep up with that’s being explained.…and then when it comes time for them to actually attempt what’s just been illustrated, their camera gives them a WILDLY unexpected result. At which point we have to stop the entire class session and spend upwards of 5 to 7 minutes debugging their camera. And then by the time we finally disable the intrusive algorithm, and begin to get the results we’re supposed to be getting, the rest of the class has taken to checking their phones, or are engaged in side conversations, and nearly everyone in the room has lost the narrative of what we were building to.

And all of this while the student’s camera was in “manual mode.”

When I first began as an instructor, that kind of interruption would happen very occasionally, but only when a student was accidentally set to some kind of automatic mode.

Never in manual.

And that’s because there used to be a pretty hard “firewall” between a camera’s manual functions and its programmed solutions, which meant that turning your camera to “manual” would immediately disable any and all intrusive programming.

But not anymore.

And in a classroom setting, not only does this distract from the topic at hand - making the concepts far less likely to sink in - but it can also discourage some students from wanting to continue at all. Because it’s not at all uncommon that, after holding up the entire class for several minutes, many students will begin to think that it's their own fault, and then they begin to feel embarrassed…and then they want to stop coming to class

Which is infuriating.

And this, maybe more than anything else, is what’s motivating me to speak out.

Because were I teaching in a vacuum, without all of these hinderances, manual photography is actually quite easy to learn. But in this context, with all of these hinderances, these cameras are being programmed to fight students every step of the way, which is making manual photography seem a lot harder than it is to any student who wants to learn it.

And I no longer believe this is unintentional.

Camera companies have grown to see manual photography as an inconvenience, or an obstacle, to their ideal business model.

And the consequence of that is that students are now having to go to great lengths just to wrestle back any bit of manual control over their cameras…while the path of least resistance is to give in to the camera’s demands, and let Canon/Sony/Nikon’s programming take the reins for you.

Which is very, very much by design.

And having taught for 15 years now, I can say that this level of interference, this level of paternalism, is a fairly new development.

But I’d like to go just a bit further into clarifying the incentives behind this business model, because there are actually a lot of different reasons why these companies do what they do.

Some of these invasive algorithms are simply designed to hook photographers into a tacit dependency on their camera’s programming. The idea is that, if a photographer gets used to seeing certain results with THIS camera, then they will be a bit disoriented when they don’t see the same results using another camera. Which motivates photographers to stick with the same brand if they want to continue to achieve familiar results.

Or to put it another way, controlling consumer expectations about how their images “should” look is paramount to these companies’ interests, as they’d prefer to SET consumer expectations rather than have the consumer come in with their own, independent expectations.

So they design a lot of the algorithms inside the camera with that in mind.

But it needs to be noted that none of those paternalistic algorithms neutrally improves the consumer’s photography (or to put it more objectively, none of those algorithms EXPANDS the consumer’s capabilities), it’s really more of an attempt by these companies to differentiate their otherwise identical cameras from each other, in order to create a clearer brand identity.

However, those algorithms aren’t the only impediment these companies are throwing at us.

Even if you dig into your operating system and disable those algorithms, we also have display screens on the back of our cameras that make our images look far more vivid and colorful than they really are, in the hopes that unknowing consumers might blame their computer monitors, or their printers, when their images don’t look quite as vivid later on.

This is particularly aggravating whenever we do controlled studio experiments at ASOP and we’re scientifically certain that every student should be getting the exact same result (in their actual image file), and yet everyone’s results will LOOK wildly different on their display screens.

If I had to guess, I’d say the likeliest reason these companies “juice” their display screens is to compete with other cameras on the showroom floor, where these companies are engaged in something of an arms race. They don’t want the images shot on their own cameras to look any less shiny and vivid than those shot on the camera immediately next to it (so once again, “consumer marketing” is interfering with genuine photographic needs and expertise).

But either way, when you couple these “juiced up” display screens with all the baked-in processing algorithms (ie: the cartoonish color and contrast boosts that are now automatically added to every picture by default), one thing that becomes immediately clear is that these companies believe that it’s more profitable to make uneducated and inexperienced photographers THINK they’re taking better pictures, than it is to give those photographers the abilities and tools to actually take better pictures.

Their research and their marketing analytics have indicated that the former is a more effective business strategy than the latter.

But it gets worse.

Mirrorless Cameras

“Mirrorless” style cameras are beginning to take over the camera market completely. And for anyone not familiar with the “mirrorless” concept, mirrorless cameras don’t have a traditional eyepiece (an optics-based viewfinder) that would allow the photographer a more neutral and unbiased view to the scene; instead, these cameras force the photographer to compose their shots on an engineered display screen (like the way you compose a shot on your smart phone).

The consensus reason these cameras are taking over the market is that they’re slightly more compact than traditional SLR cameras.

Which is fine….in and of itself.

However, the key point about mirrorless cameras is that, while their smaller size might have been the original catalyst that brought these cameras into existence, one massive, ancillary benefit these companies have picked up on is the fact that, due to the fact that you have to compose your shot on an engineered screen, mirrorless cameras force the photographer to spend more time interacting with the camera’s uniquely-designed interface than they would if they were using a more traditional SLR.

Perhaps the best way to put it is SLR’s allowed a photographer to ignore the camera’s operating system if they wanted to……but you can’t really ignore the operating system on a mirrorless camera.

They’re literally forcing photographers to interact with it.

So if you’ll recall from our previous section, in which we dissected all of the ways that the mere existence of “direct” photographers is a threat to the profit models of these companies, consider that one of the key points discussed in that section was that the primary reason Canon/Sony/Nikon dislike “direct” photographers so much is because those photographers get their results by outright bypassing their camera’s operating system, which in turn makes those photographers all but impervious to the marketing strategies — and the strong sense of brand loyalty — that have become the most lucrative mechanisms for the modern camera industry.

Or to put it more simply: the point of that section was to establish that “direct manual” photographers are a massive fly in the ointment for these companies.

And mirrorless cameras seem to be their most effective solution to that problem.

Because, if recent reports are to be believed, both Canon and Nikon are beginning to phase out traditional SLR’s entirely. Which means we’re all going to have to be using mirrorless cameras, whether we like it or not.

And while that means we can still always try our best to maintain an independent approach to our own shooting, what these companies have definitely determined — with an absolutely certainty— is that we won’t be able to ignore their operating systems anymore…..even if we wanted to.

Problem solved.

And here’s the thing, while I’m willing to give some benefit of the doubt that these camera companies might not have deviously planned it out that way from the very beginning (it’s possible mirrorless cameras really did just come about as an attempt to make cameras both smaller and lighter for the consumer market), one thing that’s been made abundantly clear is that they’ve picked up on the profitability of the mirrorless revolution and they’ve leaned into it.

And moreover, the fact that they’re forcing photographic experts to adopt these cameras as well (as opposed to just consumers, who tend to be much pickier about wanting a smaller camera), suggests that this is more than just a happy coincidence.

Because if maximizing shooting productivity, or giving photographers more choices for their workflow, were at all factoring into this — even the tiniest little bit — they’d most likely have continued to manufacture SLR’s, but with the option of the photographer choosing the “live view” function (which, for those who don’t know, is a mode of shooting that reproduces all of the perceived logistical advantages of shooting mirrorless, short of the reduced size of the camera).

But they didn’t.

Because again, these companies have zero interest in what’s best for the photographer.

Their survival as a company is dependent upon forcing photographers into having no choice but to adopt their own unique proprietary solutions.

And giving the user any “option” at all in the matter was just creating a loose end — an unknown variable within their business model — that these companies couldn’t control. Which threatened their survival in the marketplace.

So they’ve taken that option off the table.

And I heavily suspect that that’s what the mirrorless revolution was really all about.

Because, just anecdotally, if I had to pick out the one single factor that has most dramatically exacerbated the entirety of what’s being addressed in this essay, I would say it’s the advent of mirrorless cameras. On balance they’re at least 3 times as paternalistic and meddlesome as their predecessors, and they continue to give my students the most grief on a day-to day-basis.

Which means that while we were already on a steady path toward these kinds of problems back in 2010, mirrorless cameras have exponentially sped up the progression.

And due to the industry now forcing the issue on this front, my classroom has gradually gone from about 20% mirrorless cameras back when I first opened this school, to about 85% mirrorless cameras today.

And soon it will be 100%…..as has been more or less mandated by these companies.

But the far, far more important point that needs to be made about mirrorless cameras is that, because there is no traditional eye piece - because the image then needs to be composed on an engineered display screen - mirrorless cameras force the photographer to view one specific, biased “version” of the photograph…even as they’re still just composing their image.

In other words, as we established in earlier sections, there are dozens of different results (or constructs) you can get for any given picture you’re taking. And as we just established here in this section, it is very much in the best interest of these camera companies to influence consumer expectations about WHICH of those results they should be getting. Which means the newer point that needs to be made here is that, with the advent of mirrorless cameras, these companies no longer have to wait until people see the result of the shot in order to influence those consumer expectations….they now get to move that influence all the way up to the very front of the process, to the moment where the photographer is still just composing the shot, or even just considering what they what the shot to be.

And on countless occasions now, I have tangibly observed how this hinders my students’ development.

And look, here’s the thing….the average consumer is probably blissfully unaware of all of these dynamics. They have absolutely no idea what we’re discussing here, because they’ve never really needed to consider any of these factors. In their very occasional, very amateur brushes with photography, they likely just assume that what Sony and Nikon are doing must somehow be in best interest of photographers.

But this is all terribly frustrating stuff for any serious photographer — any bonafide expert — who is capable of getting the very specific results that they want, but are now having to sift through all of these impediments in order to do so.

And the whole point of this essay is that these companies couldn't possibly care less what actual photographic experts want…..because - in a theoretical vacuum - their ideal business model would be to establish a world in which there ARE NO photographic experts.

That’s their optimal business model in a vacuum.

But given that we don’t actually live in a theoretical vacuum, the way that this plays out in reality is this:

However unlikely it may be for these companies to actually get every last photographer on the face of the Earth to be hooked on their proprietary algorithms, if their marketing analytics suggest that such a world would be optimal for their profit margins, then they are beholden to their shareholders to at least try to achieve that world.

Which is to say their business model needs to at least be aimed in that direction.

And it’s very important to view every decision these companies make through that particular incentive.

So taking a quick step back here, and in an effort to add some broader perspective to all of this, what’s essentially happened in recent years is that the gulf between how the consumer understands photography and how the ‘professional’ understands photography has shrunken considerably, and not because consumers have developed a more nuanced understanding of the medium, more because professionals have lost theirs.

These companies have hooked professional photographers into thinking more like consumers, insofar as they’ve hooked them into modeling their entire professional skillset around their own proprietary technologies.

And that means these companies can now market their products to both consumers and professionals in pretty much the same way (“Trust our technologies to take better pictures for you”).

Which means there’s no reason to have to split their marketing strategies at all. They don’t need one marketing department to appeal to consumers, and a second marketing department to appeal to professionals.

“One business model fits all.”

And this has made the lives of Canon/Sony/Nikon a lot easier, because they no longer have any pesky experts insisting that they design their cameras in ways that are less profitable to them.

Therefore, in the broadest (and admittedly the most dramatic) of all interpretations, it also means that:

Instead of camera makers helping to support our most innovative photographers and industry experts…..or instead of camera makers enabling the most elite photographers who want to push and develop this medium as far as it can be pushed within our own lifetimes…….instead of that…….what we have instead is a whole generation of professional photographers who are now unwittingly devoting their entire careers to helping Canon/Nikon/Sony develop and refine their own business models…. business models that those companies can then use to optimize their own line of consumer products.

Under this interpretation, professional photographers have essentially become Guinea pigs that Canon/Sony/Nikon use to test and refine their new product lines.

And if one buys into the above premise at all, even to small degree, then it’s a state of affairs that puts an entirely different spin on what value photography even brings to our civilization (or what overall public good comes from this medium).

Because getting back to the greater notion of “what’s at stake” here, on the one hand, the existence of photography within our culture could mean that we’re developing an infinitely useful and expansive visual language……….and on the other hand, the existence of photography within our culture could instead mean that “the act of taking a picture” is something that is commodified, packaged, and controlled, in order to enrich a small handful of consumer electronics companies.

And while that interpretation might sound a bit dramatic, at the very least, we’re definitely trending in that direction.

And while this assessment admittedly ignores all of the common, everyday pleasures that ordinary people still obtain from taking simple pictures of their everyday lives and loved ones (in other words, it’s obviously still very much the case that ordinary iPhone snapshots provide humanity with immense amounts of small daily pleasures), in the grander scheme of how photography is to move forward from here — dramatic or not — this is a viewpoint that needs to be considered.

Because putting aside whether or not the common person still enjoys the everyday act of taking simple, personal pictures (of course they do), what’s almost irrefutable at this point is that Canon/Sony/Nikon’s business models are aimed in a direction that LIMITS this medium, as opposed to growing this medium.

And thus, it is absolutely critical that:

1) our culture consciously acknowledges this,

…..and then,

2) that we stop viewing these companies as harbingers of photographic innovation.

These companies are profit-seeking, consumer manufacturers only, and as such they do far more to hold the medium back than they do to push it forward.

Their need to maintain a competitive business model (and more particularly, their need to foster brand loyalty within a consumer marketplace) is axiomatically at odds with any actual photographic innovation.

And as long as our public acknowledges this, we’ll be fine. We can find a way to work around it.

But but by far the biggest obstacle to that acknowledgment is the complicity of professional photographers themselves, via their bafflingly enthusiastic adoption of - and endorsement of - these manufacturers and their preferred “solutions.”

Thus, returning to the main thrust of this section, it’s through that very complicity of the pro photography community that maybe the most egregious development in recent years has risen:

Professional-grade cameras are becoming just as paternalistic as the models aimed at amateurs.

Which leads one to wonder if, on a long enough timeline, we’ll eventually lose all ability to control our images directly at all, as we may instead, and much sooner than later, find ourselves at the mercy of working exclusively within the limitations of Sony’s “professional solutions.”

It’s not particularly far-fetched.

On several occasions I’ve had to undergo painstaking, multi-day efforts to recalibrate $2,000 Sony Alpha systems for students who needed to use them in their professional work.

In fact, a lot of high end cameras are now arriving from the factory with a very attractive interface that blatantly pushes its own programmed solutions onto the user, whereas, if you want to use manual functions you have to opt into a different interface altogether, one that is much uglier and more tedious to use.

It’s essentially the same tactic that television infomercials use: show your own products in more flattering light; show your competitor’s products in less flattering light.

Which means it’s pretty clear these camera companies see manual controls as “competition.”

And so the sum total of their message couldn’t be clearer if they were shouting it in our faces: even if you’re a highly-paid professional photographer, these companies would strongly prefer that you not practice photography with your own, independent knowledge. They’d much rather you dwell entirely within the framework of abstractions and models that they’ve built FOR YOU, because it’s much, much more profitable for them that you do so.

And the newest and most concerning development here is that they’re no longer willing to leave any of this to chance. They’ve begun designing their cameras to outright coerce photographers into behaving how they would prefer they behave.

Ok, so just to recap everything that’s been established in this section:

These are not the kinds of decisions engineers make when they’re trying to ENABLE photographers, in good faith.

These are the kinds of decisions engineers make when they’re trying to control consumer behavior.

So yeah, Canon, Sony, and Nikon are not our friends.

One particularly aggravating side effect of all of this is that I’ve increasingly had to amend my curriculum so that I can devote several extra hours of class time just to showing students how to work around these paternalistic aspects of their cameras.

Which means these camera manufacturers are now reaching into my classroom and forcing my hand in how I have to design my own curriculum.

Because while I could theoretically choose to ignore a lot of these intrusive functions (perhaps disable them when the student isn’t looking, so to speak), more realistically, I find myself obligated to explain to students why we aren’t using any of the most visible and highly touted features of their operating systems…the ones that the camera itself seems to be pushing on them.

And in any case, I’ve found that if I don’t formally address those functions, students will ask about them constantly, which means it’s actually just easier to incorporate them into the curriculum as examples of “what not to do.”

But that means we have to spend a lot of class time discussing and debunking a lot of “Type B” functions and methodologies.

Which is an absolutely absurd and soul-crushing waste of time.

And so whereas in an ideal world, we would simply jump right in on the first day of class and start discussing how photography actually works….objectively….and from the ground up. In this world, before you can start explaining anything at all about how photography works, you very tediously have to begin the curriculum by proving to students how foolish and restrictive most of their camera technology is.

And with every passing year that entire enterprise becomes more tedious and more time-consuming.

And so whereas 15 years ago, this entire dynamic was but a mild tension between very serious photographers and the mass-produced equipment they had to live with, these more recent tactics have lead me to wonder if these camera companies are becoming a genuine, existential threat to manual photography.

But more on that later.

Part 9: Pro Photographers Have Taken the Bait

But that leads us to the second group that deserves some culpability in getting us to where we are: the photography "pros” themselves. Because given all that’s been established here, you’d be forgiven for thinking that most pro photographers would share my contempt for these manufacturers.

But that isn’t remotely the case.

While there are some notable exceptions, the overwhelming majority of the professional community has not only whole-heartedly embraced Canon/Sony/Nikon’s approach, most of them have become willing and enthusiastic ambassadors for these companies, cheerfully endorsing their restrictive and paternalistic methodologies to the consumer public.

How can that possibly be?

Well, part of the reason is that pros tend to learn their photography skills in simplistic, one-off workshops, and not through an advanced college degree program. The overwhelming majority of pros spend maybe a year or two attending workshops, watching youtube videos, and reading online articles, all of which were hosted by, or written by, other pro photographers who learned their own photography skills in the exact same manner a few years prior.

And as stated before, one of the most damaging traits of the Type B approach is that, to the uninitiated, it has the strong veneer of technical legitimacy, because learning how to “ensure your highlights don’t exceed the value of 255, and ‘clip the edge of your histogram’” just sort of sounds technically complex, maybe even sophisticated.  

But it isn't.  

Once you get past the esoteric language of it, the photographers who are learning this approach are stuck working strictly within the logic and the rules set by the engineers who designed their system. And if you learn this approach, you have a very defined, very low ceiling in terms of what you can do with an image. A ceiling that was imposed by the choices those engineers made, and the kind of very limited thinking that those choices have cornered you into.

But a lot of this has already been touched upon earlier in this piece. The part that’s new here, and the part that speaks to the culpability of pro photographers themselves in all this mess, is how very proud and enthusiastic those pro photographers tend to be of their methods.

Most are pretty vocal about how much they adore their technology. They engage in endless “flamewars” over whether their brand of camera takes better pictures than your brand of camera. They love to "talk shop." When you meet one, they immediately ask what gear you use, whether you've upgraded to the newest operating system yet, whether you've seen the new Godox flash units, how you think those compare to Canon’s speedlites, etc. They enthusiastically regurgitate Nikon/Canon/Sony's marketing literature about new autofocus algorithms and sensor technology.  

And one of the reasons they do this, quite obviously, is that it’s an attempt to establish their authority among their peers. It's meant to signal to everyone in the room that they are an "expert.”  They speak the language…they’re part of the club.

And my suspicion is that Canon and Nikon have picked up on this psychology and have leaned into it pretty hard.

In fact, a lot of seemingly non-sensical decisions on the part of camera companies suddenly make a lot more sense when you realize they’re trying to abstract the process of photography into a uniquely understood system of vocabulary and technological functions, because doing so plays into pro photographers’ desire to speak an insider’s jargon, while also dividing the photography community into more zealous and brand-loyal factions.

But just to give an example of the contrasting philosophies here, and the kind of rhetoric you’re likely to hear from most pro photographers, if you were to listen in around the ASOP studio while we were discussing the advantage of shooting with one lens over another, you’d likely hear us talking about which lens would provide a more appropriate structure for the shot we want to take. Which lens would better control the spatial relationships in the scene. Which lens would better control the order in which the viewer will read and digest the narrative information in the scene, etc. We might even discuss which lens will provide more of a “depth axis” to the shot, or which lens might stabilize the viewer’s eyes, making the picture appear more “static.”

But there would be no hollow “buzzwords,” no coded language that acts as a dog whistle for other photographers to recognize, and the entire analysis would be centered around what kind of STRUCTURAL advantages one lens might offer over another.

But a ‘Type B’ pro photographer, one who is more prone to regurgitating marketing jargon, might say something more like this:

“Have you guys seen this new 24-70mm 2.8 Mark III lens? Man, this sucker is TACK SHARP! It also weighs a full 6 ounces less than the Mark II version, and we all know what a behemoth that Mark II was. I mean, just try lugging that thing around for a 4 hour wedding ceremony…am I right? Plus, with all the new upgrades to Canon’s multi-point auto-focus system, using back-button focus with this thing is going to be lightning fast!!”

See the difference?

That statement carries all the hallmarks of how pro photographers like to talk.

First, it contains several references to technical specs and industry jargon that might gaslight or alienate any layperson within earshot, while simultaneously providing an opportunity for other photographers in the room to nod, and agree, and prove that they, too, are “in the club.”

And all of this without saying a single thing about what the lens actually does, or what advantages it might give you in re-structuring your images.

Because, as we established earlier, most pros have never been taught how to re-structure an image. Most of them don’t even think in those terms. Remember, they’ve merely been taught to use their cameras to SHOW us the subject.

So they tend to reference things like the weight of the lens, or how sharp the picture might be, which are the kind of superficial issues that practically anyone can understand (and anyone can see the value in), even if you have absolutely no substantive knowledge about the science of photography at all, such as the way lenses manipulate spatial relationships….or really anything about the broader, underlying mechanics of visual communication.

In other words, things like “weight” and “sharpness” are easy to talk about, because they require no serious knowledge about photography whatsoever. It’s surface-level stuff.

And moreover, if you’re part of a professional movement wherein everyone shoots the exact same formulaic images, then you probably would be more worried about the weight of the lens than anything else. Because if you’re not expecting to do anything unique or different with your shooting (ie: if the structure of your shooting is already pre-determined) then in your mind, the weight of your equipment might truly be the difference-maker.

And the fact that so many pro photographers anchor their advice and analysis around these kinds of superficial issues offers an exceptionally grim perspective into the true depth of their photographic knowledge.

Quick interjection - for those who don’t know, the actual usefulness of one lens over another has to do with the lens’s ability to manipulate the spatial relationships in the scene, or any number of other spatial issues that substantially affect the structure of the image.

As a quick illustration of what I mean by all that, take a look at this example here. This is the EXACT SAME scene, but shot with two different lenses:

Note the change in the relationship between the foreground and the background.

Or again, let’s re-examine this experiment we looked at earlier:

THIS is what different lenses are for. They allow a photographer to manage the spatial relationships in their scenes.

Ok, so with that in mind, just know that on one end of the spectrum you have the typical layperson who knows very little about any of this (understandably so), and who thinks that the reason you might “zoom in” or “zoom out” with your lens is to change your composition, or to “crop” the image.

And on the far other end of the spectrum, you have the knowledgeable expert who knows that you use your lens in order to re-structure the spatial relationships in your scene (as just demonstrated above).

So where do most “pros” fall on that spectrum?

As surprising as this might sound, in my experience most of them fall much closer to the layperson end. Most of them still think that the primary incentive for using one lens over another is that they allow you to “recompose” the shot — either to tighten up the shot by “zooming in,” or to get more of the scene in the shot by “zooming out.”

And because those pros are operating under a lot of the same assumptions the typical layperson is acting upon, then in the absence of any substantive knowledge that might be able to separate them from the pack, those pros tend to reach for something else, something that can grant them the illusion of authority. So they prattle on about “tech specs,” and they regurgitate esoteric-sounding marketing jargon.

In short, the rhetoric in that “Type B” statement above is essentially hollow and meaningless. But it’s been dressed up in just enough insider’s jargon to make it sound more meaningful than it is.

And of course, the real intent behind that kind of rhetoric is the sort of “wink wink” play at kinship, the request to bond, aimed at anyone else in the room who has also been unlucky enough to have had to lug around a heavy Mark II lens for an entire wedding, and who is thus privy to the inside joke. It’s a dog whistle that is meant to act as a beacon of exclusivity (“who else here is also ‘in the club?’"), and the perverse sense of social status that they believe accompanies it.

But you can also see why, to someone who doesn’t know any better, that kind of rhetoric might sound legit. It just smacks of “insider-ness,” while also invoking a lot of technical-sounding terms.

And aspiring photographers, like any other group of people, mostly just want to fit in. And they certainly don’t want to feel like they’re out of step when attending a professional workshop that might help launch their own professional career, a workshop at which they’re hoping to make positive, personal connections within the industry.

So when they hear statements like this early in their education, they just smile, and nod, and learn to mimic it.

After all, they want to be in the club too.

Thus, the biggest reason pro photographers so proudly adhere to this approach is that they simply don't know any better.  This is what the industry has taught them.  

And as much as it seems like I’m piling on my disdain here, in truth, it’s actually very difficult for me to place the bulk of the blame on these pro photographers directly. After all, I know exactly how they’ve been educated; I’ve seen it first-hand.

While they were still very new to the profession, and still very impressionable, they were told again and again by very confident-sounding authority figures that THIS is how photography works.

And in order for them to have diverged from this kind of typical “pro” thinking, they would’ve had to have 1) ignored the advice of every confident-sounding authority figure they encountered throughout the entirety of their education, and then 2) formulated their own unique set of theories and strategies instead.

Which is an awful lot to ask of anyone.

Still, in meeting with pro photographers, I’m constantly disheartened by the sheer number of them who aren’t even aware how little they know about photography, apart from the paternalistic technology they’ve been given.

To put a very particular slant on this, tons of “pros” have applied to teach at ASOP, each claiming to be a bonafide expert in photography, but it usually takes only a few minutes of conversation to discover that they’ve done a good job learning to regurgitate the “jargon” that Canon/Nikon/Sony’s engineers have given them, but understand very little about the actual, underlying principles that those engineers were trying to address.

And it becomes instantly clear that, in their minds, “teaching photography” means showing students the various features programmed into their cameras, while spending the rest of the curriculum offering advice on posing and composition and whatnot.

And the reason they think that’s what “teaching photography” entails is because that’s what their own professional education consisted of.

Most of them don’t even know how to measure the light in their scenes.

Even fewer know how to exploit the underlying physics of photography in order to make their images more complex.

And most of them don’t think they need to know - they entirely trust Canon/Nikon/Sony’s technology to handle all of that for them.

And the bottom line here is that, if all of these pros would just take the same amount of time and effort they currently put into learning their “tech,” and instead put that effort into learning photography, they’d be able to free themselves from these lifeless formulas and begin producing more unique and dynamic images on a very consistent basis…probably within just a few months.

In fact, I’ve found pretty universally that my students learn the Type A approach in less time than it takes most pro photographers to master their Type B approach, so again, the irony of this can’t be overstated.

But the problem is, Canon/Sony/Nikon would strongly prefer they put their efforts into learning their gear instead, and they’ve had ample opportunity (in fact, a near-captive audience) to deliver their own side of this argument, and they’ve dumped tons of money into doing so, while the opposite side of this argument has had almost no public presence at all.

The mere fact that they control the very interface by which photographers operate gives these companies a decided advantage, and thus, the approach that these companies are pushing goes largely unopposed, even within the industry.

The end result is that these pros have become, unwittingly, very effective and gleeful ambassadors for Canon/Nikon/Sony's business model, which is probably where the most effective damage has been done.

Because - and here’s the worst part…

Most amateur photographers take their advice from these “pros.”

All the workshops that amateurs attend, and the tutorials they read, tout that they’ve been “written by the pros,” or that they’ll teach you to “shoot like the pros.” And the online forums that amateurs consult for advice are crawling with professional photographers just waiting for an opportunity to proselytize their tech-based methodologies, and to prove to the world just how well they’ve bought into Sony’s system.

In fact, on many of those forums, it’s quite common to see pro photographers attempting to assert their dominance by picking substantial fights with one another over some of the most trivial and nuanced details from within that system.

And whenever that occurs, it’s just sort of tragically amusing to see honest-to-god professional photographers zealously and angrily splitting hairs over the tiniest details of a very limited, paternalistic system that was designed for them, by someone else.

It’s a bit like if a professional cooking philosophy suddenly sprang up around using only Chef Boyardee canned products, which then lead to bonafide professional chefs zealously and angrily arguing over whether to heat the canned ravioli in a sauce pan or in a corningware dish.

In our version, though, we have professional photographers who are all shooting the exact same picture of a girl on a staircase, in the exact same pose, with the exact same composition….but then there’s a “flamewar” in the comment section over whether they should have used the 85mm 1.4 lens or the 85mm 1.2, or whether they should have shot the image in RAW or JPG.

But getting back to the main thrust of this article, the lasting effect here is that, due to the advice (and the example) perpetuated by these pros, the single largest and most lucrative demographic of camera owners - hobbyists - has now followed these pros directly down the same rabbit hole into this Type B methodology, all but ensuring that there is no significant market force remaining that would keep Canon/Sony/Nikon honest.

The simplest way to put it is that these pros have unwittingly done the camera companies’ bidding, by roping the amateur crowd into practicing the medium in exactly the ways these companies prefer.

And because of that, these companies have now successfully achieved an impenetrable market position, by which their two largest clienteles (both pros and hobbyists) have embraced the approach that is most profitable for them.

Mission accomplished.

These camera companies officially no longer have any significant portion of their customer base clamoring for them to change their business model, which means they effectively answer to no one.

And my point here is that the camera companies couldn’t have done it without the help of those pros.

So to summarize this entire section, if the camera companies can be blamed for doing everything in their power to gradually rid the world of direct, manual controls, coercing photographers into using their own proprietary abstractions…..then pro photographers are just as much to blame for essentially declaring to the public “Eh, you don’t need manual controls. Plus, all these cool camera features come with a built-in jargon that will make you sound super smart to all your friends!”

Or to put it another way, the camera companies sit atop the industry, and facing downward they’ve positioned themselves to be able to control: 1) how the public behaves while holding a camera, 2) how that public understands this medium, and 3) even what language and vocabulary the public uses in speaking about this medium.

They’ve accomplished all of this as one big ‘top-down’ mandate.

And they’ve roped pro photographers into being their “middlemen,” into being the messengers who deliver and proselytize their preferred framework directly to the general public.

And those camera companies have worked very, very hard to achieve that position.

Part 10: “Imposter Syndrome,” and the Problem with Qualitative Industries.

Finally, I’d like to offer one last observation regarding the patterns of modern pro photographers, one which will likely serve as a microcosm for a much greater societal issue, extending deep into several other creative industries as well.

This industry - the photo industry - like so many other qualitative or “creative” fields, is plagued by the “fake-it-til-you-make-it” mentality, which is a mode of operating by which someone simply powers through their own ignorance until they sort of feel like they know what they’re doing, or more poignantly, until their client is convinced they know what they’re doing.

And in this particular case, because the camera industry has abstracted the process of photography so substantially, many pro photographers have a very shaky and nebulous grasp of what it is they’re actually doing. They know how to “press the right buttons” on their interface, and check for the right “indicators" in their metadata — ie: they’ve learned to mimic those actions and recognize those patterns — but a lot of them have no idea what any of it really means underneath the surface.

And to be as personal and specific about this as possible, my experience has been that when you get 2 or 3 pro photographers in a room together, with no one else around (and particularly if alcohol is involved), it’s very common for them to straight-up admit this to one another. In fact I’ve personally witnessed dozens of pro photographers readily admit that they didn’t know what they were doing at all the first time they delivered services to a real client.

And this strikes me as something you can only get away with in a qualitative industry.

I suspect surgeons, for instance, would have a hard time “faking it til they make it.” Ditto for chemical engineers. Or criminal attorneys. Or any industry in which the outcome is more measurable or binary (ie: you either succeeded at your task or you didn’t).

And to be clear, I’m not at all lamenting the qualitative nature of photography. In fact I love it. It’s what gives the industry, and the medium in general, endless space to evolve.

What I am lamenting is that the “intangible” and qualitative nature of this industry very often opens the door to a lot of professional fraudulence.

My personal theory on the matter works something like this: for any professional who makes their living in a qualitative industry, an industry whose results and successes are not measurable or tangible, but rather are contingent upon the mere SATISFACTION OF THE CLIENT, then any such professional will eventually discover that there are two viable options for success, and that one is much easier to achieve than the other:

Option 1) They can substantially develop their creative skills, in an effort to offer an elite product that out-competes what the rest of the industry is doing,

OR

Option 2) They can merely improve their ability to PERSUADE their client to be satisfied with whatever product they have given them.

And it turns out that it’s much easier to develop the ability to convince your client that you did a good job, than it is to actually do a good job.

And this seems to be the preferred adaptation in any industry with qualitative standards.

For instance, graphic designers often pass off a lot of lazy, unimaginative, templated work to clients by selling it to them as “the latest trend.” Website designers pass off a lot of lazy, unimaginative, templated work by selling it to their clients as “what all the other companies are doing.”

I’ve also seen a lot of this from “Brand-Management Strategists,” and other similar occupations.

These are all industries where the client often doesn’t know the difference between good and bad work, and their opinion of the product they’re getting is largely determined by how confidently the creative professional sells them on it.

Hence, it’s easier to get good at the selling part than it is to get good at the creative part.

On a practical level, the economics here are not so different from any company that manufactures a physical product (automobiles, electronics, soft drinks, etc.), and has to decide whether to put more money into the product itself, or to put more money into advertising and marketing the product once it’s been manufactured. Many companies choose the latter, simply because they’ve calculated that it’s more cost-effective to convince the public their product is good, than to actually make their product good.

But the more qualitative the product, the easier and more tempting it is to drift in that direction.

And I should say, of course, that this clearly isn’t the case for every creative professional, in every creative field. Not even close. Obviously there are tons of phenomenal graphic designers, architects, web designers, etc. out there.

But I have to admit that my experience in the photography industry does lead me to wonder what the more cynical insiders in those respective fields might say about their own colleagues: how many of them are the genuine article? And how many of them are just exceptionally good at convincing their clients to be happy with their work they’ve been given?

Because, again, it strikes me that an electrician would have a very hard time convincing a client that they’ve done a particularly stellar job if the lights in the room literally won’t turn on.

And all of this further causes me to wonder if, in an attempt to replace the increasing number of quantitative jobs that have been lost to automation, we’ve overcompensated, and we’ve created more qualitative jobs than we have willing or passionate candidates for.

It’s possible that many of the people who currently work in qualitative fields possess values and dispositions that might have lead them toward other lines of work in previous generations. And if true, perhaps the modern pro photographer simply doesn’t care whether they get to use any creativity or innovation in their shooting, because they don’t view any of this as a creative endeavor. They merely view it as a form of ‘sales.’

In other words, it’s possible these photographers are merely a product of a certain evolution, wherein two requisite phases preceded their ability even to enter this occupation: First, camera companies needed to invent a set of algorithms that could take the pictures for you, allowing people to enter the profession without the least bit of curiosity or passion about how photography actually works. And then second, consumers needed to be convinced that “this is what professional images should look like.”

Once those two dominos fell, it suddenly became viable for people with more of a disposition toward “sales” to enter the profession.

A photographer no longer needed to be good at both the creative and the “sales” parts of the job…. they really only need to be good at the “sales” part.

And that has left us with a large volume of photographers who don’t especially care whether their pictures are sophisticated, or creative, or original, because they don’t see their primary skill as “taking good pictures,” they see their primary skill as “selling images,” and making the customer feel good about the images they’ve just sold them.

And I should say that in that last particular task, modern “pros” are really quite good at what they do.

It’s very difficult to imagine that, 50 years ago, creative professionals would have taken so little pride in their own knowledge and abilities, particularly regarding the very profession they had devoted their lives to. Perhaps I’m being naive, but I have to imagine that the creative professionals of previous generations would have been conflicted (if not outright annoyed) about having to use formulaic templates all the time. Because whatever personality traits had lead them to choose a creative profession in the first place would have felt at odds with any scenario in which they were denied the ability to use any kind of unique, creative voice in their work.

One would think.

I would think it takes someone more interested in sales than photography to PREFER not to have to worry about any of that - to prefer having a templated formula handle the creative part of their jobs for them.

Which would go a long way to explaining why most pro photographers I meet have absolutely zero curiosity whatsoever about how photography really works (and even become borderline defensive and irritable if the topic is broached).

And all of this has lead me to wonder if a lot of today’s professional photographers ended up in their careers more by default than by choice….as in, they went seeking a product they could sell, or a market they could exploit, and they landed on photography merely by chance.

Because, as I’ve already intimated throughout this article, my experience with photographers has been that for every one of them out there doing competent and innovative work (and there are tons out there who are doing so), there are also countless more who are charging $8K for wedding pictures that could probably have been shot on a smart phone, and then they do a super-human-level job of selling their client on some strong, emotional, customer satisfaction - selling them on the idea that the very simplistic and formulaic wedding shots they’ve just delivered to them are actually something quite unique and special.

I guess kudos to them.

They’ve learned a very powerful business skill, perhaps even from the very camera companies I’ve been critiquing throughout this essay. Because in much the same way that Canon/Sony/Nikon have figured out that it’s more profitable to make photographers THINK they’re giving them great tools than it is to ACTUALLY give them great tools, these pro photographers have likewise figured out that it is easier and more profitable to make their clients think they’re taking great pictures, than it is to actually take great pictures.

But one final note on the matter.

For anyone who has read this far, there will certainly be those who choose to remain in a massive amount of denial about all of this, simply because they’ve devoted several decades of their lives to practicing photography in this particular “Type B” manner, and their authority, as well as their livelihoods, would be put at risk by any large-scale exposure of these patterns.

But more to my interests are the readers who, once made aware of these dynamics, won’t be able to unsee any of this. They won’t be able to unsee the cliched sameness and hollowness of most professional photography, and they won’t be able to unsee the evasive insecurity that pro photographers often exhibit when asked to explain the underlying sciences behind their images, as they’d rather just regurgitate the marketing rhetoric that was developed around their proprietary technologies (side note: if you want to see a “pro” photographer become REALLY defensive, just ask to see their images before they’ve had a chance to edit them in Lightroom).

And for those readers, I can offer one small bit of reassurance and optimism, which is that, in terms of outright volume, in terms of sheer numbers, there are more professional photographers taking innovative pictures today then at any other point in the history of the profession.

After all, where else would I have found all of the wonderful “Type A” examples I’ve used throughout this piece?

The problem is, while there are more of those photographers than ever before, proportionally speaking, those photographers represent an increasingly smaller percentage of the professional community with every passing year. And their influence over the industry, and the camera companies who design our equipment, has become almost entirely diluted by the EVEN GREATER number of “Type B” photographers that enter this profession each year.

So the point of this article is less to speak out against the professional photography community merely because it feels good to do so, but more in the hope that it will raise enough awareness about the problem to start swinging the momentum in the opposite direction.

We badly need “Type A” photographers to wield more influence over this industry than “Type B” photographers.

So consider this article a call to action for anyone interested in a more sophisticated photographic medium, or for anyone who wants to see how far this new mode of communication can develop within our lifetimes.

Because if left in the hands of the “professional industry,” there’s plenty of evidence that this medium might actually devolve into something even less sophisticated on our watch.

Conclusion: Why All of This Matters

There is more to be concerned with here than just the snobbery of wanting to see professionals take “better pictures,” or the tediousness of having to sift through the unconscionable hodgepodge of marketing strategies that comprises a modern-day operating system.

There is a very real concern that the industry’s behavior in recent decades has left both halves of this equation vulnerable to automation, and possibly extinction.

In recent years, I’ve been asked by so many prospective students, “why can't I just use an iPhone for my photography?” 

And the truth is, if you’re going to shoot images like these:

….you probably could.  

As already noted, this approach to photography incentivizes photographers to choose very simplistic scenes so that their camera’s programming can better handle the image.

And once people become very acclimated to these kinds of simplistic shots (the overhead shot of food, the senior portrait on railroad tracks, etc.), once those shots have become our “industry standard,” then yes, those sorts of very simplistic images can indeed be handled by similar algorithms on smart phones.

In fact, many of those shots could adequately be shot on an iPhone today.

The only reason most Type B photographers still shoot with a ‘professional’ camera body is because professional cameras still shoot at a higher resolution, and their lenses still produce slightly sharper images.

In other words, they’re not using SLR’s over smart phones because they think they can get better structure out of their images. No, it appears they’re mostly fine shooting the same kinds of images that smart phones can shoot, they just want their final results to exhibit slightly more resolution and sharpness (or maybe less “noise”).

But sharpness and resolution are entirely superficial attributes (for instance, neither is especially noticeable if you’re viewing an image on Instagram), and moreover, it’s only a matter of time before smart phones can recreate the same levels of resolution and clarity.

And more importantly still, sharpness and resolution do exactly nothing to alter the style of an image, or what an image communicates.

So Type B professional photographers are now in danger of being replaced by automation, as the simplistic images they've been cornered into taking can now be mimicked by the technology inside most smart phones.

And if one is to survive as a professional photographer in the future, one will have to be able to outperform the basic algorithms that have been inserted into every smart phone on the planet. And anyone who's pinned their career to an algorithm-based approach (or to ephemeral parameters such as resolution and sharpness) is in danger of being out of the job. 

But then, in one final twist, it’s also possible that Canon/Nikon/Sony's short-sighted decisions might, very ironically, convince the public that those companies themselves are now obsolete, because once the public has become acclimated to seeing these kinds of very simplistic images (even in the professional realm), then the very moment typical smart phones CAN reproduce the very same images that Canon’s algorithms can produce, Canon might very well go out of business, as well.

And if that happens, manual photographers may lose their equipment entirely.

Because until now there’s been something of a begrudging stalemate, a mutual and tacit resentment, between the serious photographers who loathe having to use these paternalistic operating systems, and the camera companies who loathe those photographers right back, because they’re far less loyal and less profitable clients.

The deal works something like this: serious photographers begrudgingly buy Sony and Canon products….and Sony and Canon begrudgingly give them manual functions in return.

And for the time-being, that begrudging stalemate allows the more knowledgeable photographer at least the option of sifting through their camera’s operating system until they can get to the more direct, manual controls.

However, if the major camera companies fall, we all may be left shooting within the limited algorithms of smart phones…or alternatively, we may end up having to pay over $30k for industrially produced, small batch photography gear.

So the problem with going all in on mass-production is that is has incentivized the makers of cameras to follow the leads of market economics as opposed to expert leadership and innovation within the medium, and in the long term, that just might be the camera industry’s undoing.

So is there a solution to this mess?

The Bottom-Up Mandate

One defense against such an extinction would be to elevate our standards for what qualifies as a “professional photograph.”

Because as long as “brick-wall-overcast-day” images remain the industry standard, then smart phones are going to take over entirely.

But if our standards for professional images improve beyond the basic, flat, evenly lit shots that professionals are currently taking, in other words, if professional photographers more frequently shoot images like these:

…then smart phones are less likely be able to compete within the serious photography industry, because images like these aren’t easily achieved through simplistic algorithms, because images like these are peppered with light differentials, layers of space, and movement.

Whereas, images like these…

….are actually very easily achieved using basic algorithms.

And such a shift in standards would enable the makers of our manual cameras to stay in business for a little while longer, or at least force the makers of smart phones to give us more options for controlling an image directly and manually.

Because the greatest danger here is that, if we are going the way of total automation, we can expect that the process for automation is going to be a reflection of the standards and paradigms we have regarding what makes a “good image” at the time the process was automated.

In other words, right now, if the industry standard is simplistic, “brick-wall-overcast-day” images (ie: if that’s what the public thinks a professional photograph should look like), then our automated processes are going to reflect that preference, and therefore produce those kinds of images.

And if that standard is then HARD-WIRED into the only equipment we have, then we’ll be unable to practice the medium in any other way, and all photographs will eventually be “Type B” photographs.

We won’t be able to structure our images in different ways, or ‘voice’ our images in different ways…the only thing we’ll be able to do is swap out the subject matter.

Thus, if the primary culprit in this predicament has been the camera companies themselves (and I would posit that it has), then this problem has been sent to us as a “top-down” mandate. From the top, camera companies have directly influenced how the professionals who buy their products practice this medium, and in turn, those professionals directly influence the casual consumers below them.

Therefore, one obvious remedy would be to reverse the flow of this power structure and initiate a bottom-up mandate.

How?

Well ASOP is currently training beginners and amateurs to shoot images like like these:

….in the hope that if we can get amateurs to shoot their friends, loved ones, and travels in this manner, then that should put some pressure on professional photographers to have to step up their game if they want to compete within the industry.

And if professionals do improve the quality and standards of their own shooting, to the extent that our cultural expectation is to see more dynamic and more sophisticated images in ALL spheres of photography, then we just might be able to put enough pressure on Canon/Nikon/Sony to bend to our whims, rather than the other way around, and swing the balance of power that has thus-far stifled the development of the photography industry.

For while it is tempting to blame professional photographers for not holding their own work to a higher standard, my own view is that we were always going to arrive upon this scenario, once a for-profit, consumer-driven marketplace gained exclusive control over our entire access to this medium.

And at any rate, I’ve found it’s exceedingly difficult to change the minds of professional photographers. For one thing, it’s just human nature for there to be a heavy inertia, or even an outright defensiveness, in the behavior of those who’ve practiced a craft in one particular way for many years on end. And in this case, that inertia is further complicated by the fact that their current methods have granted these photographers a special kind of authority in the public eye…and they won’t be particularly keen to forfeit that authority.

So then what options are we left with?

Well, if you can’t convince camera companies to forfeit their more profitable business models (and you cant), and if you can’t get pro photographers to part with the methodology and jargon by which they’ve acquired all of their professional respect and authority (and you can’t), then the most realistic solution is to precipitate a movement that leads to the widespread improvement in the photography skills of amateurs and hobbyists.

I’ve found it’s much easier to get total beginners onboard with direct photography, for the simple reason that they have no skin in the game; there is absolutely nothing at stake for them regarding the particular way they practice this medium, except for the actual results they’re seeing in their own shooting. They aren’t concerned with losing face, or losing their authority, or having to unlearn a method they’ve long believed in.

So one of the primary goals of the entire ASOP curriculum has been to get amateur photographers onboard with a methodology that can quite easily leapfrog their abilities above what’s being done by 85-90% of the established pro community, and if that can be achieved on any kind of larger scale, it just might grab the attention of those pros, and the Industry at large, and force them to improve their standards.

And while I certainly never started out with the intention of forming “The People’s School of Photography!!” (fist in air), pragmatically speaking, I’ve found the layperson general public to be far more fertile ground, and a far more ideal partnership for this curriculum, than trying to align or coordinate ASOP’s trajectory with any part of the established industry.

And for the record, as naively optimistic as all of this may sound, this kind of ground-up, democratic change-for-the-better isn’t entirely without precedent.

For instance, our so-called “Foodie Culture” has arguably witnessed a bottom-up mandate in recent decades, as an endless stream of cooking shows, youtube channels, foodie blogs, and specialty kitchen stores has created a more knowledgeable restaurant clientele, with a different set of expectations, which in turn has lead to a world in which even the very best and trendiest restaurants of the 1980’s and 90’s almost certainly wouldn’t survive in today’s hyper competitive marketplace, simply because diners demand more from a restaurant now than they have at any other point in our cultural history.

In other words, the standards for the restaurant industry are rapidly improving — the dishes are becoming more complex — because the industry is taking its cues from increasingly more knowledgeable and more demanding diners, as opposed to the other way around, as opposed to the restaurants dictating how diners should eat, based on what best suits their own profit models (which is more or less what the camera industry is doing).

So it can happen.

But for it to happen, it will take a substantial uptick in both the skills and demands of amateurs photographers for “pros” to be properly incentivized to change their methods, which is why that has become the stated mission of ASOP - to initiate a more assertive and concerted bottom-up mandate.

Like it or not, we need these companies if we want to be able to practice photography with any seriousness at all. Because, as noted above, we’re entirely dependent on mass-produced equipment.

But we badly need to flip this power dynamic; we need these camera companies to follow our will, rather than millions of photographers following theirs.

TLDR Version:

Camera companies: “Don’t shoot manually, use our proprietary algorithms instead!”

Pro photographers: “But those algorithms can’t seem to handle any complexities at all, our pictures are coming out really weird”

Camera companies: “Well, just shoot simpler scenes….in fact, here are some really dull formulas you can use.”

Pro photographers: “Uhhh…”

Camera companies: “What if we sweeten the deal by giving you meaningless upgrades every year that you can brag about to your photo buddies? We’ll also give you a super secret language that no one else is privy to!”

Pro photographers: “Deal !!!”

Camera companies: “But one more thing, you also have to use your workshops and tutorials to convince the public that the “expert” way to practice photography is to let OUR engineers take the picture for you…”

Pro photographers: “Yeah yeah yeah….we already said we’d do it.”

Concise Timeline of Camera Evolution:

1) Mid-Twentieth Century

Camera companies, in an effort to make photography more accessible to the uneducated amateur (and also in order to open up the consumer market), begin creating a stripped down translation of photography that most consumers can engage and understand. They create guide books with simplistic advice (such as the “Sunny 16 Rule”) and include some generic functions on the camera’s interface (such as a depth of field gage). The hope is that, instead of spending a few months learning the properties and the logic of the medium, people can maybe get a decent photograph just by learning a few basic functions and “rules of thumb” instead.

2) Late 20th Century: 1980’s and 1990’s

As those initial rules and functions couldn't account for major variations from one scene to the next, most amateur pictures were still failing to come out the way the user was expecting, so camera companies begin making their “translation” more complicated, adding several more layers and facets to the camera’s interface (things like Aperture Priority Mode, Evaluative Metering, Exposure compensation, etc.). These new functions are all still pretty limited and unreliable, but each function is more SPECIALIZED - designed more for a limited set of tasks and solutions - as opposed to the earlier, more generic functions that were designed for all tasks.

During this era, it becomes increasingly true that, for many pro photographers, their first experience with this medium is learning these more specialized functions, as opposed to learning the actual underlying properties and logic of photography itself.

Also during this era, as photographers begin to engage these unique, proprietary interfaces, camera companies realize that their operating system is more valuable than the physical camera itself. In other words, when it was the case that their business model was dependent on building a better shutter, or a better aperture, they had a harder time distinguishing themselves from their competition, but as photographers gradually start adopting these unique functions and operating systems, it becomes much easier to distinguish a Canon from a Nikon. Camera manufacturers lean into this (hard), and make it the centerpoint for their marketing strategies and brand identity.

3) 2000’s and 2010’s

At this stage, the operating systems on most cameras have now become very complex and very convoluted (i.e.: they're no longer the "accessible"  translation they were meant to be 40 years earlier). And novice photographers are now confronted with the choice of spending a year or two learning the actual logic and science of the medium, or spending a year or two learning the proprietary solutions created by for-profit companies like Canon and Adobe. Both tasks seem equally daunting.

And with two equally daunting options on the table for aspiring photographers, camera companies then set themselves about aggressively marketing their side of this argument. And as these companies are the gate-keepers to the only equipment photographers reasonably have access to, the general public never gets to hear the other side of this debate at all. So while it’s quite easy to demonstrate how much simpler and more efficient it is to learn the underlying logic of photography, there is no profitable incentive for anyone to make that argument at the societal level.

We now enter a world where most photographers spend several months or even years learning the technology as opposed to the medium. And because even the most "advanced" and specialized operating system functions are still relatively unreliable and superficial, the preferred adaptation becomes taking simpler pictures - pictures that most generic algorithms can handle. Photography workshops perpetuate repetitive formulas (overhead shots of food, a family portrait in a field of flowers, an engagement portrait in a gazebo) as those formulas allow a photographer to avoid all major variables that might trip their algorithms.

Also at this point, because those algorithms and formulas produce a lot of dull and inexact results, there is now a strong shift toward the belief that most of what makes an image good actually happens in post-production. Photographers begin to see post-processing as not just a necessary part of the process, but that it is, in fact, where they should be allocating most of their knowledge, efforts, and creativity. That they should be spending more time in post than they spent on actually capturing their images.

And now software companies (such as Adobe) begin aggressively exploiting this dependency the same way Canon and Nikon did in the previous era. They aggressively update their software, add new features and plugins, and license their platform to third party companies who also design their own plug-ins.

We now have the same “industrial algorithms complex” at the post-processing level that we had at the camera level.

5) Present Day

Today, the typical professional photographer spends the better part of a year learning the abstractions of Canon/Sony/Nikon's technology, and then they spend at least as long learning Abobe's Lightroom and Photoshop functions. And after all that training, they still have limited capabilities and a very low ceiling on how many ways they know how to structure an image (or how many ways they know how to exploit a scene's assets), and most importantly, they’re still entirely dependent on proprietary translations of photography that they have no control over. 

Their idea of a photoshoot is to stage the simplest scene possible, largely based on assets such as location, staging, and posing (and formulaically so), and then they use the algorithms they learned in workshops in order to “capture” it. They shoot with a comical level of inefficiency - bracketing their shots, often shooting a scene many times until one of the takes finally "comes out," and then they spend hours in post-processing "correcting" the image and trying to add cartoonish, artificial "pop." They're also totally dependent on their algorithms, which means Canon/Nikon/Sony/Adobe have them on the hook to keep upgrading their equipment and software.

Finally, most of them aren’t aware of any of this at all. They honestly think of themselves as “experts.” Despite the fact that they possess less than 20% of the fundamental knowledge and abilities that my own amateur students can demonstrate.

Canon/Sony/Nikon/Adobe have succeeded in getting them to buy into a totally warped sense of “expertise,” by pushing them to rely upon their own proprietary abstractions. Abstractions that these photographers have never had any say in the development of.

And now those photographers are stuck working within a tiny, limited fragment of what this medium can actually do. And yet, as they’re working within that limited fragment, those same photographers flaunt their “authority” toward the public (without any hint of irony or self-awareness), constantly telling amateur photographers how they should shoot.

This is the current state of the professional photography industry.

Thanks for reading.

- Andrew Jacob Shapiro

Founder, Austin School of Photography