Friday night I had to shoot some photos at a party my school partly organized. I tried to prepare myself as well as I could by reading articles about it and began with expectations of lots of interestingly lit, vibrant pictures (at least that's what I bought my wide aperture lens for). Due to less light than I had ever expected and a lot of motion my "colourful" pictures turned out really crappy and I ended up doing what I had promised myself to avoid at any price: Taking really boring "portraits" of couples and friends, I'm sure you all know them, with in-build flashlight. To save a bit of quality I made a diffuser out of a piece of white plastic - nice - which fell off and got lost in the crowd around 1 am. It was diastrous.
An old master of portrait photography, cant remember his name, used to spend lots of hours with his model while observing its character and general behavior, then he would eventually find just the right moment to take a picture, keeping composition and lightning in mind. He said he shows the people how they really are.
I really agree to him and try to do this when taking portraits. They just feel more interesting to me.
When thinking about how many people claim to shoot "portraits", especially at parties, I feel like portraiture is decaying today. A stranger asks you because you seem to have a good camera (size and what flies around your camera body matter a lot, even if having nothing to do with image quality..) and in one second you turn your camera on, eventually on auto mode, and shoot the picture. You have done nothing but caring if everyone can be visible. You show the picture to the stranger and if he looks pretty on it he'll like it.
Most photo studios I've been to work the same way.
Of course there are a lot of examples for quality photography out there, but the fact that taking pictures became extremely easy during the last decades seems to ruin everything.
Fine, that's the problem. But what bothers me even more is that nearly nobody cares about it, but a lot of especially young people consider themselves as "photographers" because their pictures look sharp and clear. And a lot of people who aren't involved in photography at all applaud to them without even knowing what real photography is.
I don't want to sound like a jealousfag. I don't consider my photos as what I stated as real photography because I'm still learning.
Any thoughts on this?