Sunday, July 20, 2008

Too much photography - whence goes the art?

The Online Photographer ponders the effect of there being available a massive amount of photos. What will happen to the concept of great photography?
Technology is leading to a sudden photographic efflorescence, a thousand points of light if you will. That's cool in some ways - but it means real quality is getting lost among the profusion and the massive increase in supply is cheapening the value.
I'm currently following about 20 blogs about photography, and many of these are posting excellent pictures weekly or even daily. And there is an endless-seeming collection of nice-looking photos at sites such as Flickr and Picasa. But will this mean that the art of photography will disappear behind the massive scale? Will the norm be somebody taking a good photo by accident vs. doing photography by skill and art?

1 comment:

Matt said...

I agree, I'm relativly new to photography myself. I only shoot pictures on my time off from work but it's my belief that a great photo takes thought and time to compose. Most of the time I will go to a place where I think a good photo can exist and wait hours sometimes for the light to change and give me the photo I'm looking for. However, it's unfortunate that now every body has a decent digital camera and can take as many photos as they want, whenever they want. I think the accidental photographers will eventually take over.