What an amazing phenomenon! I was in Midtown Manhattan this afternoon, sitting in one of my favorite spots from which to shoot street characters, and I started to notice how many cameras are being toted around by so many people. Not counting people taking snaps with their phone cameras, I would have to say that easily one third of all the people I saw were draped with a Nikon, Canon, Sony, or Olympus of some kind. Many of them DSLRs.
What surprised me even more was that everyone was using them. Well .... almost everyone. There were some who were so uber-cool that they had to be seen carrying a Leica M9. But be caught actually using it? Heaven forbid!!
Here's the point: the digital camera revolution has made photography easily accessible to so many people that the pundits and talking heads who want to tell us how to think say this will kill photography. Shooting with a phone camera, and processing with Instagram? That's not photography!
I won't argue that point. All I can say is that if so many folks are taking pictures, even if they are just family snaps in front of the Apple store on Fifth Ave and 59th Street, there's bound to be a heightened sensibility for good photography. If just a few of those many people develop a better understanding and appreciation for what goes into creating a meaningful image, and if a few of those few step forward and begin making images that actually say something, we're all better off for it.
I'm sure he'd agree:
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