you know what they say about a man with a big camera …. small eyes.

from the Fora of vacationing Ansels:

yeah, I love it when some DLSR wannabe comes up to me and asks if it’s hard to get film. .. he usually skulks away after meeting a real photographer

which led me to wondering what makes the man with his head up his camera a real photographer and those others not as real?

Is it as simple as the tool, the camera thing? Certainly the pictures can’t be the decider, at least not the subject matter. The Fora-lete bloviate for years about their grand meaning, and their equally great contribution to stemming the tidal wave of destruction, yet they can’t live long without jerking off about the jerk with a cell phone, or how expensive those MFDBs are. While they gladly spend hundreds of hours posting images no different than the ones that stream by on Flickr and Facebook.

The difference is clearly not in the eye of the holder.

To those who marvel at the camera, and the sense, the chemical, to those people who spent years fixing windows, filling out tax forms, presenting power points of project updates– to all those lackluster lives hoping for some other other than their week life, the week vacation made meaning. A mountain or roots and rocks or beach and babe are easy imagery to duplicate. No one will expect you to have understood more than focus and exposure, not if you keep to the standard fayre.

remember to preach your power of format. that is the easy way to explain, to yourself, your spouse, and the others, why you make so damned few images, none of them memorable or worth the silver they were written on

the pictures taken by the cell phone tourist, and the large butted photographer don’t grow better by time spent in developer,

if in the end, they mean the same thing, they are the same thing