Everything change, all stays the same!

Ok so I admit that the title to this post is confusing…. However the other day a client made a statement to me about how photography must be “so much harder for professionals now that everyone can take photos”.
Funny thing is photography has been available to the masses for all of my lifetime and most of the previous generation as well. Sure technology has changed but the actual concept, optical science and required vision have not. Most people today capture their images digitally rather than use film, but light still has to pass though an optical focusing mechanism before exciting a whole bunch of electrically excited receptors to create a picture. A wide angle lens still works much the same as it did ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago, as does a telephoto or zoom lens. Automatic exposure systems still get it right about 80% of the time as they did during the latter parts of the film era. Autofocus has been around for decades, admittedly it has advanced more rapidly since digital photography, that most likely because of the relative youth of the technology than anything else.

One thing that has remained constant throughout the relative short life of photography as a medium… is the photographers vision. From memory it was Henri Catier-Bresson who said something to the effect that there is nothing worse than a sharp rendition of a soft fuzzy idea. Ahmen to that.