FWIW, Annie Liebovitz (a decent photographer, some might say) has recently said that she recommends the iPhone as the “snapshot camera of today.”
It’s not JUST about the equipment, but the equipment is important, too.
The reason I say that is being I just indulged myself with a new 50mm 1.4 lens. I am, by no means, a skilled photographer. Especially not skilled enough to get great results with just any equipment. But, this lens is fast enough that for the first time, I was able to shoot indoors with ambient light. I was able to capture an image with reasonable shutter speeds at the same light levels I was seeing with my eyes. It was neat. I’ve always sucked at using the flash because I can’t predict what the light is going to do. I can just image what a full-frame sensor would be like.
I’ve heard for years, “It’s all about the glass.” If I wasn’t convinced before, I am now. I’ve been able to take some impressive snapshots with my BlackBerry. But, they’re still snapshots taken in broad daylight. In any short of challenging lighting, you get bad snapshots.
Blurring the background isn’t really a good reason to use a DSLR. I just use blur filters in the photo editor when I what to control the center of attention or there is ugly stuff in the frame. Sometimes when there is something in the picture I don’t want, like powerlines, I don’t blur then, I just erase them.
Sometimes, I just think of the picture from the camera as starter material for the final image.
I can’t help but think all ‘photography’ in the future will be simply pulling from a person’s High Def always recording feed and adjusting it in post.
Especially when you see technology like that new camera that lets you change depth of field after the photo’s been taken. (I’m spacing on the name.) The camera is currently a bulky box about 1.5" on a side and 5 inches long…ah, here it is: https://www.lytro.com/camera
When the device is capturing 4k by 4k, at a color depth higher than the human eye can see, and is storing it long-term in flash memory with no moving parts, will we have photographers any more? Or will they just be Set Designers?
That may well replace the average persons random so so snap shots.
It won’t replace the good set up photographs. Or ones where the photographer adjusts the lighting/flash set ups.
Or the one where the photographer waits until that tree, the clouds, the crowds/whatevers and the natural lighting is JUST RIGHT for that perfect photo.
That’s exactly what I use my pocket camera for. I’ve got some really interesting subjects, odd and funny signs and this (may not be SFW). But these are not great pictures, just pictures of interesting subjects.
With the right equipment you can convey movement even if nothing is moving.
And by the way, no filter is going to look like lens blur.
Or concept photography.
BTW, just came across this: a picture that looks deceivingly simple. The right photographer with the right subject and the right equipment.
I remember doing stuff like that back during the 20th century. Now I don’t even insist that everybody show up at the same time. Most people aren’t going to go over a picture with a magnifying glass. I read an interesting article on detecting photo retouching.
Thats interesting. I agree when they have got to 5 they have gone too far.
Lets say I can wear a helmet that records at 5 gigapixels in all directions at 60 frames per second. And it can record at very low light levels. And after the fact I can even adjust the depth of field. Even with that you are going to need someone with a “photographers eye” to catch and adjust the “good pics” out of the metric ton of crap my magic helmet records.
Even with that you still will fall short. Back when trilobites roamed the earth I learned to take photos. I had to learn to get the focus right. And when to use a slow f stop vs a fast f stop. What shutter speed to use. What focal length lens to use. And how to hold the camera to minimize blur. When to use a slow film or a fast film. And some other shit I probably am forgetting. Then after all this technical stuff I had to learn how to frame things properly.
This last one is critical. Once I got the technical aspects down I noticed one thing I found myself doing. Not only was I adjusting the framing, I would often adjust EXACTLY where I was standing to take the picture.I might move left or right or forward or backwards or get lower or get higher to get the point of view I wanted/needed. And after that EXACTLY when I took the picture.
So, IME you need to be in just the right place at just the right time to get that really good photo. That is not going to happen even if folks are running around with high tech equipment recording everything they “see” at high def.
Yeah, at that point folks random photos of their trip to disney will likely improve greatly if someone is willing to churn through the crap to find the good stuff. But, IMO good/great photographers will still be a step above the hoi poi.
You obviously won’t spring for the A.I. that drives your muscles to be in the right spot, and the other A.I. to do your photography for you. 
If you don’t get the shot, check Facebook, I’ll bet that gal right next to you got it, and she’ll license it to you for a reasonable amount.
This thread reminds me of a recent favorite photo of mine. Ran across it today looking for other stuff. We were paddling a river that had a “rapid” on it. This “rapid” was a rock shelf where the river dropped down maybe two feet with a few midsized rocks on it. A fellow paddler was running it. I took the camera and held it just a few inches above the water level at the down rapid side. I also got pretty close to the rapid and one of the rocks the water was flowing over. Now the guy in the red canoe was off in the distance upstream lining up for running the rapid.
So, now, in this pic, the rapid looks big and impressive and the poor little canoe looks tiny. So, already, I have greatly improved what I could see by getting creative.
Ironically, this picture was technically poor in several aspects. The canoe was far enough away you couldn’t tell who it was. The pixel count wasn’t that great. It was an overcast day so the contrast and sky kinda sucked. And it was winter so all the trees kinda looked crappy. A few of the major ones just looked like bare sticks in the photo.
So, I took this pic and manipulated it. My cheapy image processing program has an effect called “oil painting”. It takes a photo and makes it look like an impressionist? oil painting (of course the amount of this effect is adjustable). With this I was able to take the problems with the photo and turn them to my advantage.
Now I had an impressive rapid being run by some tiny red canoe. The fact you didn’t have a crisp image of the sky or trees or canoe/canoeist just made the rapid that much more dominate in the pic.
Now, I guess you could argue whether thats real photography or something else. But I will say thats something that aint going to automatically going to be produced even if you are running around recording your life in HD all the time.
And most importantly: light. Sometimes the light you have is not the light you want. Light is what makes a picture, a lot of times you see something and it would look totally different under different lighting conditions and those lighting conditions are what you want.
Son in addition to HD Real-life helmet I would have to go around with strobes, light modifiers and whatnot.
You guys are way off base. We already have the technology to let you take a bunch of pictures around an object and take them home and then construct a 3d image where you can create any view you want. I’m sure pretty soon they will be able construct any lighting scenario you want. The pictures the camera take will be raw material for a 3-d graphics program that you can manipulation in any way you want.
We already have cameras that can automatically detect if the subject is smiling or blinking or construct panorama pictures. Or start saving pictures from before you pressed the shutter release. They do tilt-shift or HDR pictures.
I don’t think there’s anything that technology can do to replace the intent of the photographer to capture something in a particular way, and to do it.
I’m not even an amateur, but if I take 1,000 pictures each year, I can come up with about 10 good ones to put in a collage for the holiday cards. However, these are simply representations. They are not art. I did not intend to make them what they are. They just happened, like Hamlet could have happened were a million monkeys typing on a million or bazillion typewriters for however long.
That, to me, is the difference. It is also the difference between good abstract art, which is aesthetically pleasing and meaningful, and what is produced by my two-year-old, which also occasionally ends up aesthetically pleasing and which is very marginally meaningful.
Also, you end up with a higher proportion of good pictures to bad ones when you have a good photographer. So that’s less sorting. But ultimately to me it’s about intention.
If you can even capture the light you’re interested in.
I work just off the 16th street mall in Denver, There are three or four times a year where the sun shines directly down that street. Based on the weather and atmospherics and lord knows what else, it creates the most amazing over-exposed golden hazy light show. It does it about 10am after all the workerbees are in their cubefarms and most everybody misses the spectacle.
And I really have no idea how you’d capture it.
If you like it, and you’re happy with it…it’s art.
That’s the WIERD thing about it; someone else may criticize the cropping or retouching or choice of content, but art doesn’t need to be validated by everyone to be art.
Sistene Capel ------------------<my photography>------------------------a figurine of Jesus Christ in a jar of urine.
Big spectrum there.
And most people still take crappy snapshots with all that technology. It’s still the photographers eye (and skill at using his/her tools) that makes for an interesting shot. Those tools include the camera, lighting, and post processing as they always have, but today post processing is a little different than working in a darkroom. Same concepts.
Sorta yes.
But there are limits. If I stood a good distance from that rapid with the camera of the near future you describe and then later decided I wanted a POV that was inches above the water and much closer to the rapid that superduper camera/software would have to just make shit up. Now it might be able to do so in a pleasing manner that doesnt look like a bad photoshop hack, but it won’t capture what was really there. Now, that wouldnt really be a problem if I then decided to “oil paint” my photo. But if I wanted a high quality crisp and realisitic photo it would be.
In the future we won’t be called photographers anymore. We will be called “image wranglers” 
God I love the smell of photoflo in the morning.
Actors are already worried that a digital representation of them will be cheaper to use, won’t age, won’t have drug problems, and be much more profitable/popular after the original actor dies young.