Covid-19 photography and the "professional"

It has been a very long time since I did a photography update. This has been due to several factors. I'm sure you'll recognize them.

1. Work - this has me busy during the school year as I work 5am to 5pm for the school district. Yes, it's long hours but the overtime makes up for that and the fact I don't have to work during public holidays, at weekends or in the summer.

2. I'm concentrating on two other projects at the moment. One has taken almost 6 years. That's due to it being a big project during which I'm having to learn new skills to complete it. Then there's the safety aspect where everything has to be tested before implementation. 

3. The other project has barely got started - I have to complete the big project before I can really afford myself the time and space to work on the other project.

4. Other demands on my time. I'd love to go out with my camera but doing so generally involves driving and while I'm a darned good driver, I try to stay off the roads during my free time.

I'm using a phone camera more these days than an actual camera. It works though fuddy-duddy camera fanatics will all disapprove. Their point is one of "ultimate image quality". They're the kind of people that want the most megapixels despite the fact none of them will ever make use of all those megapixels. Each and every one is a hypocrite because they buy their expensive cameras on purchase plans and pay so much every month yet they don't put their money where their mouth is and buy high definition medium and large format cameras. It's more a case of "I could just about afford payments for this camera so I can laugh at the camera you actually own. 

Some while ago I was at Chimney Rock. While I was up there, I was taking photos with my old, secondhand Olympus whatever-it-is micro four thirds camera. Two fellows were poncing about, waving their cameras in very obvious ways to try to make me look envious. They asked how many megapixels I had. I told them - very much to their incredulity - that I really didn't know. They bragged about theirs having so many megapixels to which I showed no interest at all. They lost that one!

I thought people had stopped fussing about megapixels a long time back. Every camera on the market has sufficient megapixels to put a decent sized image on Facebook. That's the only place most of these braggarts will ever show their work. Indeed, it has got to the point where megapixels are now utterly irrelevant.

Any photographer worth the time of day will be concentrating on using whatever camera they have to hand to produce worthwhile photographs. Most of the time that's a phone. The same people that spend thousands on their cameras will scream about how they would never use a phone for their photography yet they do the job. The whole point of a camera - and this escapes many people - is to take pictures. I don't know too many people that buy a phone just to brag about it to other people yet that's what camera owners do. 

"Woohoo. Look at me. I just spent $5,000 on this camera". Yeah well look at me, I reply. The camera I'm using was $600 brand new but I paid $75 for it when I bought it after the dick that paid full price sold it. That dick lost $525 or around 90% of its value. Imagine that $5,000 camera sold for 10% of its value (if indeed it ever got that much). That's a $4,500 loss. That's several months rent, a good chunk towards a new car or food for a year.

Now we have Covid-19 and all those expensive cameras are lying idle. People cannot leave their houses unless they are on a work trip or a trip to get essentials. A walk around a photogenic area is NOT an essential.

I carry my phone with me all the time. I never know when I might get called in to work. I'm a state employee and on call. So, when I see something ridiculous I will photograph it. Heaven knows what the fellow is doing with his trousers half way down or why but that was what I saw on my way out of the grocery store car park.

Is it shot with a camera with the perfect settings, perfect exposure, perfect lighting, fifty million megapixels etc? No - it's shot with an iPhone through a grubby windscreen. The gritty atmosphere is all there. The action is there and the story is there. You know why the shot was taken. You know the star of the shot. You know where it was. All we don't know is the why this fellow would do this. I can only assume that the cabin fever caused by Covid-19 lockdown has affected his brain.

With the downtime, it's perhaps time for those that consider themselves to be "professional" to reconsider their options. Just about everybody and their dog now has a camera. Most people just don't care whether their pictures have the ultimate quality. Throughout photographic history, the "professional" has always been fairly dubious and has changed the name of what they do.

• When photography first started, the professional was the one that could afford the camera.
• As photography became more common, the professional was the one that had the better camera.
• As autofocus, auto exposure and then digital came in, the playing field leveled considerably so the professional had to sell themselves on skills.
• Now everybody has a perfectly adequate camera on their cellphone, its very hard to distinguish what makes a professional any better than a casual phone user.

Over the years "professional" photography has always enjoyed a very seedy image. Now, while everybody is housebound, there is no such thing as "professional" photography. Nobody is out there making a living from photography. Even the newscasters are sitting in their living rooms talking to the camera on their laptop. It is thus time for the professional photographer to take stock of where they are in life.

Today there was an interesting article elsewhere about just such a thing. There were 9 points raised. Paraphrasing they were:

1. Look at your gear. Just what in there don't you need? What can you get shot of that you've hardly ever used?
2. Redraft contracts - well - that's a joke really. With all the cameras around taking perfectly adequate photos, better just to throw contracts away. 
3. Back up your photos - always worth doing. I suggest copying the SD card onto a solid state hard drive and also onto Blu-Ray. Then store each in physically separate locations. Keep the Blu-Rays in a safety deposit box and the SD cards in a fire safe. This "cloud stuff" could just go poof - no matter how much you've spent on it.
4. Update your portfolio - I suppose them mean update your brag box. The photos you show on Facebook. Seriously - nobody's going to pay money for a "professional" when they have a darned good cell phone camera and can keep taking photos until they get what they want.
5. Experiment taking different kind of photograph. Now is the time to try out Schlieren photography, high speed photography. All the stuff can be ordered online and it's cheap once you have the camera. 
6. The big laugh "selling stock photos". I can't believe the jerks put that in their list. Stock photos are a money loser immediately. Why should somebody pay for a photo when they can just go to one of the free photo websites or just take a photo themselves? It makes no sense.
7. Diversify income. Yes - this is what you need to do. If you have been struggling under the delusion people will actually pay for photography and are finding they aren't as keen as you are then you definitely need to get another line of work. 
8. Prioritize spending. Seriously - if you're not getting income you should not be spending. While there are people legitimately idle due to the Coronavirus (me for example) they're usually on a retainer (like me). 
9. Take up a new hobby. There's nothing wrong with photography as a hobby but as I said, if your passion is outdoor photography then yes, you might need a backup hobby. 

I said it was an interesting article. I've changed my mind a bit now. It was yet another example of some tired old hack putting out a word quota on "professional" photography. There was less of substance to the original article than I'd thought. Mind, substance isn't one I'd put into a sentence that included the oxymoron of "Professional Photography".

Honestly, if you're an amateur photographer then good for you. Follow your passion. If you're calling yourself a "professional" then you're fooling nobody but yourself. All those wonderful "contracts" are like as not pity purchases from people that feel sorry for you.