Nowadays, are we all photographers?

Photography is an art, but does a good camera and access to a free photo editor make you an artist? As a photographer, I’ve been questioning myself if my profession and my passion are being killed, slowly and painfully, by new technologies…

Today, everybody has access to a good phone, a relatively good camera, and also a free app which in just a few seconds makes a picture look ok. Just ok. But, what about the quality of that image? What if you want to enlarge that picture 4 times its size? What about the procedure of deciding where, what and when to click, edit and retouch that picture and after a long process looking at the final result? I believe that having certain tools and thinking that you know how to use them does not make you a photographer. Many people assume that having the latest camera or a good editor as Photoshop will instantly make them a good photographer. Knowing how to use GoogleTrans doesn’t make you a multilingual translator. Likewise, blogging doesn’t make you a journalist.

Photography is not just taking pictures. Photography is a moment, is taking a decision in one particular millisecond. It is certainly not taking hundreds of pictures just because they are digital and then relying on the cropping tool. Being a photographer is having the eye trained to be able to know what’s going to be a good image and what’s not even before taking a photo. It is involves knowing what aperture, ISO, depth of field, composition, metering, shutter speed, RAW, and several other concepts are. Besides, being a photographer is more than just choosing between ‘Amaro’, ‘Valencia’ or ‘LO-FI’ on Instagram.

In conclusion, I think there is a substantial difference between being a photographer and just taking pictures of your daily life. I consider myself a lucky person for being one of the many photographers that had the amazing experience of using an analogic camera, being part of the darkroom process, studying about photography history, and spending hours and hours giving this art the time it deserves.

Henri Cartier Bresson