Selling photos to others is not "the natural progression of photography"

[charchri4]

Having owned my camera a whopping 2 weeks now I'm about as new to the craft as it gets around here. So I have a question. Who makes the rules?

I am learning the rule of 1/3rds, the exposure triangle and the rules on background blur. In my quest for learning I find one guy who says fill the frame and another who says leave space. One guy who says too much back ground blur is distracting and another who says too little is distracting. And apparently it's fine to have to have a railing coming out of a persons butt but a cardinal sin to have a column coming out of their shoulder!

So who made the rules and do they ever change? Is the person that decides how much background blur is appropriate the same one who decides what the best crop is or are things delegated to specialists?

 

[The_Traveler]

Yes, but that really isn't the point.
The point being made here is that selling isn't the only end.

Plenty of people have gone from armature to pro in all sorts of endeavors with nothing more than a little vision and a lot of determination.

But on your issue, getting into any business, there are certain questions you must ask - or expect to fail

• is there a market?
• Is the market stagnant or growing and is it underserved in a way that would benefit new businesses?
• is there current competition and how can I beat them? and
• what is the barrier to entry for other competitors?

There is a low to medium-end market but it is either stagnant or shrinking because the number of people working or trying to work in the field is growing and potential customers are accepting cell phone pictures as OK enough to skip pro work.
The existing competitors are chasing every customer and using lowered prices as bait.
The availability of cheap but smart cameras and lenses and the virtual total lack of controls in the trade means that there is no barrier to entry.

Someone who buys/gets a camera now, hoping to be in business, is looking to develop both skills and a customer base in the face of enormous competition from equal or more skilled people.
That kind of thing may be OK for someone who doesn't look at this as a prime means of support but more of a part-time job that buys some equipment.
If that's the way you want to spend your off hours, struggling for bucks in the face of increasing cheaper competition, go for it.

But recognize the situation.

 

[Scatterbrained]

Having owned my camera a whopping 2 weeks now I'm about as new to the craft as it gets around here. So I have a question. Who makes the rules?

I am learning the rule of 1/3rds, the exposure triangle and the rules on background blur. In my quest for learning I find one guy who says fill the frame and another who says leave space. One guy who says too much back ground blur is distracting and another who says too little is distracting. And apparently it's fine to have to have a railing coming out of a persons butt but a cardinal sin to have a column coming out of their shoulder!

So who made the rules and do they ever change? Is the person that decides how much background blur is appropriate the same one who decides what the best crop is or are things delegated to specialists?

The "rules" are general guide lines of good taste developed over centuries of art history. That said, there are plenty of "Internet Experts" out there who really shouldn't be listened to. Too much blur a bad thing? Sometimes. Context can be good, and really help to elevate a portrait, but sometimes the location is less than photographically ideal and a good dose of blur can be the answer. Background blur can be horribly distracting however if you use a lens that renders jarring, eye aching bokeh; something like the Canon nifty 50 . A railing "coming out of someones butt" sounds painful. However, you generally expect people to lean or sit on things with their butts, so it's ok. Besides, unless you're photographing Nicki Minaj or Kim Kardashian the butt isn't the primary focal point of the image, the face is. You generally want to avoid distractions around the face, like things "growing out of their heads".

 

[The_Traveler]

hat said, there are plenty of "Internet Experts" out there who really shouldn't be listened to.

^ that

re: experts
If what they say applies directly to your picture and makes sense and you think it makes your picture look better, then listen.

If its a load of look-at-me on top of a tiny comment, nahh forget it.

 

[Derrel]

The so-called rules of photography have been mostly borrowed from the field of the visual arts, and the study of design and composition. Plus, there's a tradition of fine art painting, drawing, and sculpting that goes back many centuries. Classical body posing, and poses for the human body, were carved into marble by the ancients, long ago.

The Chinese gave us the idea of aerial perspective (simplified meaning "haze" as an indicator of distance) centuries before European artists ceased drawing their human figures with black outlines around them. In the Renaissance, artists learned the secrets of painting using camera obscura and lens systems; this is little known knowledge, but David Hockney's BBC documentary Secret Knowledge is proof enough for many scholars, who can now understand that the photorealistic paintings of many great masters were, in actuality, drawn off of PROJECTED light rays!



The elements and principles of design are what guide photographic composition, not some facile rule of thirds thing that was first concocted for a popular magazine in 1970. Anybody who has studied photography as fine art at the university level will have been exposed to the elements and principles of design; the fine arts in the USA are ridiculed by many, people who say, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like!" and, "Painting? This is a painting? My KID could have done this!" as they stand in front of museum pieces that their lack of exposure to fine art and their lack of education on the arts prevents them from understanding within any significant context.

The "rules" of composition and design are very old. They have been studied, and there has been much written about them, but most people have not availed themselves of the knowledge about the visual arts, just as most people know almost nothing about say, internal medicine, house construction, or jet aircraft mechanics. I personally know only the most bare-bones things about medicine,construction, or jet engines--yet my utter ignorance of those fields does not mean that there is not a huge, extensive body of knowledge that each of those fields is built upon, and which the highest level practitioners have been taught the elements and principles of.

 

[Scatterbrained]

Derrel, have you seen the documentary "Tim's Vermeer" yet? If you haven't seen it you should try to catch it sometime. Very cool. My wife has been bugging me to make her one of the devices from the movie ever since we watched it. BTW, it's a popular misconception that medieval painters only know how to paint in flat, 2D outline style. It's simply what was popular at the time. There is other surviving European art from the time period that shows otherwise.

 

[charchri4]

Good stuff Darrel thanks. You bring up many good points and perhaps without trying to drew a great distinction. There is a big difference between visual arts and jet engines and that is one is art and the other science.

As I look at that from a frame of reference I know, I can say matt black paint only looks good on 55 to 57 Chevys. That is the art side of the car and any fool who ever painted a Camaro matt black soon found out the truth to that. On the science side you have to have fuel, spark, air and the proper timing and compression for said Chevy to run. There is a little wiggle room in it but very little while the paint color can be a million options and still come out great.

So who made the matt black paint rule? That would be the movie 2 lane black top and a several million hot rodders that have built cars since. Is it a rule I and the vast majority of hotrodders believe in whole heartily? Yes. Is it a quantifiable rule that should be called a rule? LOL ask this guy.

 

[Derrel]

I did a quick internet search a while ago. I typed in "going pro in photography". Google returned about 50,000,000 items. Fifty million hits.

going pro in photography - Google Search

Boatloads of classes, courses, on-line courses, home study course, web sites, tutorials, blogs, class series for sale, and so on.

Apparently, there are a few random,ill-informed people who will dispute the idea that there is a lot of push and hype toward encouraging people to sell photos. Today, it is no longer just the New York Institute of Photography selling courses to churn out new watermark professional photographers--there are literally millions of other entities encouraging people to "go pro".

 

[jcdeboever]

The so-called rules of photography have been mostly borrowed from the field of the visual arts, and the study of design and composition. Plus, there's a tradition of fine art painting, drawing, and sculpting that goes back many centuries. Classical body posing, and poses for the human body, were carved into marble by the ancients, long ago.

The Chinese gave us the idea of aerial perspective (simplified meaning "haze" as an indicator of distance) centuries before European artists ceased drawing their human figures with black outlines around them. In the Renaissance, artists learned the secrets of painting using camera obscura and lens systems; this is little known knowledge, but David Hockney's BBC documentary Secret Knowledge is proof enough for many scholars, who can now understand that the photorealistic paintings of many great masters were, in actuality, drawn off of PROJECTED light rays!



The elements and principles of design are what guide photographic composition, not some facile rule of thirds thing that was first concocted for a popular magazine in 1970. Anybody who has studied photography as fine art at the university level will have been exposed to the elements and principles of design; the fine arts in the USA are ridiculed by many, people who say, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like!" and, "Painting? This is a painting? My KID could have done this!" as they stand in front of museum pieces that their lack of exposure to fine art and their lack of education on the arts prevents them from understanding within any significant context.

The "rules" of composition and design are very old. They have been studied, and there has been much written about them, but most people have not availed themselves of the knowledge about the visual arts, just as most people know almost nothing about say, internal medicine, house construction, or jet aircraft mechanics. I personally know only the most bare-bones things about medicine,construction, or jet engines--yet my utter ignorance of those fields does not mean that there is not a huge, extensive body of knowledge that each of those fields is built upon, and which the highest level practitioners have been taught the elements and principles of.

I once had a sit-down conversation with a well paid copy artist. What was interesting is the answer he gave me when I asked the question, who is the hardest artist to copy? His answer floored me, he said, Mark Rothko. He went on to tell me that he had visited his Chapel in Houston and was absolutely amazed by what he witnessed. He tried for one year to duplicate one of his colored paintings and gave up, he could not figure out how Rothko got the depth, luminosity, and clarity he witnessed in person at the chapel. He felt like he could literally walk inside of the painting. He was in that chapel for a good part of the day and never realized he had been in there that long. I had the same experience when I visited the chapel a few years back. No drugs were involved.
Call the easiest artist to copy or the great masters according to him
Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

 

[Buckster]

I did a quick internet search a while ago. I typed in "going pro in photography". Google returned about 50,000,000 items. Fifty million hits.

going pro in photography - Google Search

Boatloads of classes, courses, on-line courses, home study course, web sites, tutorials, blogs, class series for sale, and so on.

Apparently, there are a few random,ill-informed people who will dispute the idea that there is a lot of push and hype toward encouraging people to sell photos. Today, it is no longer just the New York Institute of Photography selling courses to churn out new watermark professional photographers--there are literally millions of other entities encouraging people to "go pro".

Interesting. Of course, we all already know that there are lots of resources out there for learning virtually anything at all, so that's not much of a revelation.

Now point to the ones that say that the ONLY reason to pursue photography is for monetary gain, which is what was claimed, and what I challenged.

By the way, I typed into Google, "Apple Sucks" and got 13,400,000 hits. Over thirteen million hits. Then I typed in, "bear cubs know how to start a fire" and got 44,500,000 items. Over forty-four million hits. Then, just for fun, I typed in, "Derrel doesn't know what he's talking about" and got almost four million hits.

Funny how definitive that method of ascertaining truth works, ain't it?

ETA: Somehow, I came up about 50 million hits short, and only got 2,010:

 

[jcdeboever]

Y'all need to learn how to Google search that's for sure[emoji4]

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

 

[Jim Walczak]

I think I have to agree with most of the sentiments here. The fact of the matter is that I've seen a lot of work from so-called professionals that just...wow...sucks! There's no real polite way to say that...I've seen a lot of pro work that's just REALLY awful. Whether it's because they're more interested in business or have simply lost their passion for the "art", I can't really say, however because they just don't have that passion...because it's essentially little more than "a job", their work suffers for it every time. While this is purely a personal opinion, I think this especially applies to many "portrait studios", where so much of the images produced are generic and unremarkable at best...most of it's "assembly line" more than anything with very little creativity involved. Unfortunately A LOT of so-called pros can get away with it simply because the majority of their clients really just don't know what good photography really is.

Perhaps what's even sadder is that this doesn't apply to just photography/photographers either. Consider how many people may become doctors or lawyers, NOT because they have a passion for such professions, but simply because they think they can make a lot of bread! It's rather scary if you stop to think about it.

For myself at least, while I do run my own humble little freelance business, to me it's all about the passion first. If I don't enjoy what I'm doing, wow...I just don't do it. For example, I could make A LOT of money shooting weddings, but I've done it a couple of times and I -HATE- IT. I will NOT shoot weddings....ever! I'm the same way as a musician...I could probably make a small fortune producing "beats" and such for local (c)rappers or hip/floppers, however I -really- hate that stuff. For me, as a working musician, I play the music -I- enjoy playing and when I make some coin at it, so much the better. And perhaps that's the distinction...I'm an artist and for myself, whether it's photography, music, vector illustrations or 3D animation, I -care- about the work I create and I do take a great deal of pride in my work (and I'd like to think that's part of what keeps my customers coming back to me). I do make money at it, however the money is NOT the priority for me...if it were, I'd sure as hell be doing something else!

Anyways, just my own $.02 worth...

 

[Brundo]

This is an extremely interesting thread. I agree. Too many people are running around with the most expensive gear they could get their hands on claiming to be pro's. (Shamefully I was one of those guys) When I first started I really wanted to make a career out of it. Then I tried posed portraiture and realized I didn't like it. No matter what I did I couldn't get it to work. I (being extremely ignorant) thought portraiture was the only way to make it in photography. However since I could not get portraiture to work, and since I had zero desire to shoot portraiture. I took a step back and looked at what I wanted to shoot – landscapes and wildlife. I decided to shoot for myself. Not for my mom, or my best friend, or my 3rd cousin twice removed. I realized that if I was forced to shoot what I don't enjoy I would learn to hate my passion. However if I shot what I love then I would never grow tired of learning photography and that I would enjoy the learning process. I don't claim to know much about photography. Check out my photos I'm sure there are dozens of flaws to be found. I realize that there is plenty of room for me to improve and that is honestly one of the best realizations I've come too. Mainly because I shoot because it's my get away. I no longer desire to make money off my work. I do it simply because I enjoy it. I think that if wanna-be photographers took the time to focus in on their motives, learn the art properly, and realized they are not a pro over night just because they have the latest camera and a gig lined up. Then society would be better able to understand what professional photography looks like. This is my $0.02. I don't expect anybody else to hold this same opinion. And again I am most definitely not a pro.

 

[Vtec44]

Dang long thread. If someone who I feel that's a crappy photographer but getting businesses and I don't, then maybe I'm doing something wrong. LOL If I don't want to sell my photos and do it as a hobby, then who cares if others are selling their photos. What about we just do what we do best, and let others do what they want to do? Have fun, enjoy what you do, take more beautiful photos (paid or unpaid) !