In a world where AI is becoming more prevalent, advancements in editing software, and a time when cameras have become more accessible than ever, it poses a question: has photography become too easy?
There was a time when buying a camera was an investment—and it still is—but the investment was much more significant, and the process was more complicated. If you wanted to start photography as a career, you went to college or worked with another photographer to learn the trade. Photography was about finding a story, whether a portrait, a project, or even a family moment, and snapping and telling the photograph. Nowadays, you can hop on the internet, purchase a camera, log in to YouTube, and call a friend to be your model. By the end of the week, you’re taking photographs. Recently, I started thinking about whether photography has become too easy or if it just feels that way.
It Used To Be a Whole Lot Harder
Technology has made purchasing your first camera, learning the technique, and starting your journey more straightforward. There was a time, back in the day—I sound old, but it’s true—when you had to work to get started. I remember getting started meant reading magazines and articles to research cameras and going to a camera store first to decide which camera you wanted to purchase. If you didn’t have a local store selling cameras, you would have likely been purchasing your gear through a nationwide camera chain catalog. When it was time for your purchase, you filled out the form in the catalog, wrote a check or provided a credit card number, and mailed your order form. Next, you needed to learn a few things. You went to a bookstore, bought every beginner photography book you could find, walked out of the store, and started reading! Those two steps alone were a lot of work, but we now live in a different world.
The Tools Have Changed, But Has The Art?
Film went to the wayside, and the new DSLR took center stage—for a hefty price. Time went on, and prices came down, leading to a time when some say everyone became a photographer. It took the skill of looking at a scene and creating a proper exposure. Today, without any knowledge, you can pick up a camera and properly expose a photograph. I know photographers who create outstanding photographs compositionally yet lack good technical photography skills and struggle with everything else.
Have we lost the art? This depends on how you define art. Is art in creating a technically and compositionally outstanding body of work, or is art described as a skill? In today’s world, we see some of the most talented creators ever, and I believe it’s because we have social media, making it easier than ever to share our work and get it in front of an audience. We haven’t lost the art of creativity in our community; we have lost the art of skill. The phrase “I can fix it in Photoshop” has been a real killer. Many do not take the time to correct an error in-camera; instead, they correct it by sitting in front of the computer screen in software. One can conclude that ease of accessibility and use has diluted skill in photography and devalued skill as an essential thing to have as a photographer. Meaningful and impactful photographs will still be created no matter how easy photography becomes, and that is the true meaning of photography.
Do We Lack Intentionality?
In my mind, absolutely! There are so many things we can discuss when talking about intentionality in photography. I could go on about the photographer’s vision, lighting, framing, lens choice, and settings. We use these things when making a conscious decision, and consciousness is the keyword here. We must consciously make many decisions in photography. Today, we lack this process because photography is becoming too easy! The more decisions cameras and software can make for us with the turn of a dial and the click of a mouse, the more comfortable we become. When this happens, we remove the thought process and critical thinking.
Let’s take a look at a newer Lightroom feature: lens blur. This is a great feature that allows you to blur the foreground or background of your photograph using AI. When I first read about this update, two things came to mind. First, I could see newer photographers utilizing this feature to get around using the correct aperture, resulting in another “I’ll fix it in Photoshop” scenario. Second, I thought, WOW! This is a game-changer and another tool in my photographer’s toolbox. In this scenario, we intentionally bypass our critical thinking skills because of technology and its ease of use. It’s human nature to take the easy way out. Why change the aperture? We can change it after the fact in post if we need more bokeh. That’s a lousy thought process!
In the End
In a world where photography has been more accessible than ever due to cheaper cameras, AI-driven software, social media, and ease of learning, it’s easy to question if photography has become too easy. Has photography become too easy and accessible? Undoubtedly, yes! We have just scratched the surface of a much larger conversation. If we think about it, is it a bad thing? No, it isn’t. Photography used to be a very complex process with significant financial investments. Now it’s becoming easy, but in a different way. We may have lost skills, critical thinking, and intentionality in the creative process, but this applies only to a select few in the grand scheme of things. Scroll through Instagram any time of the night, and you’ll see this is evident. Photography is still a craft with complex challenges, thought processes, and skills. However, while all these things may make photography seem easier and more accessible, it will only be easier if you make it that way.
Photography is still about telling a story. If not that it’s just a snapshot. Much of what you see from “photographers” are snapshots. No story behind the image.
"The spirits that I summoned / I now cannot rid myself of again" – Photography is nothing more than a lifeless body, maltreated and raped a million times over. The photo is just a random pile of pixels, edited to death and presented with pride (What a great photographer I am ...) Nobody needs photographers - the artist is a pixel pusher, the artwork comes from a prompt … Brave new world.
If one is interested in the photograph as simply a "pretty picture" or to demonstrate mastery of some piece of hardware or a particular post processing technique, then perhaps it has become not too easy or simple but far too formulaic... pushing buttons and moving sliders until a desired result is achieved is relatively easy. The real difficulty in photography is how to use the content of the photographs one produces to tell the subject's story... figuring out what that subject's story is... realizing that the photography flows from the subject's story... and that each story is different.
Photography has a long history of cameras which enable the ordinary, unskilled person to take pictures. The pictures might be more as a way to record life's everyday events than creating works of art; nevertheless, simple cameras requiring virtually no skill have been around a long time. In 1888, Kodak wanted to bring photography to the masses, so they solved the difficulty of film developing that had kept photography in the hands of the dedicated professional. Automatic focusing and exposure in 35mm cameras has been around since the mid-1970s, so I can't remember a time in my life that easy-to-use cameras didn't exist. Manufacturers are funny about that... they almost always want a larger market and more potential buyers for their products. Ease-of-use often makes that happen. If you want to take snapshots, there's always been a camera for that; however, if you want to make exceptional photographs, it takes greater skill than simply pushing a few buttons. Nothing's changed.
The fundamental process of creating a photograph has remained unchanged in my mind. In spite of the advancements in camera features and post processing tools, a photographer must still do two things: see the picture and get it in the camera.
Great topic!
Brushes and paints are just as accessible as pencils and markers, but that hasn’t created a world full of great artists.
Ideas and vision define any visual art. If you possess them, you create good work; if not, it doesn’t matter how good your tools are.
I think certain types of photography have become a lot easier for instance sports and wildlife. Photography is a lot easier. You just put it in one of the subject detection modes and you're pretty much good to go. It's not that difficult stick it in F4.or whatever the zoom lens is. And the subject detection is so good in the Sony Nikon and Canon cameras that you shouldn't really miss.... I would even go as far as to say if you are a wildlife shooter now and you can't shoot birds I would find another hobby. Seriously it's not difficult however landscape photography is completely different because you are waiting for the right light. You can't just make the light happen and you have to be patient. Portrait photography is a lot easier now because of lighting but the ability to tell a story in a Portrait is still quite challenging so I think certain types of photography life I said have become easier but there are certain types which are still very challenging.
Portrait photography certainly has gotten easier due to instant review, wireless flash, affordable strobes, and so many modifiers to play with. However, one thing that all those toys can't replace is the human connection between photographer and subject. No processor is going to build trust, create rapport, and make an image that is _about_ the person, not just _of_ them.
I don't do photography full-time. I'm actually a drug and alcohol counsellor by day and building rapport with people is easy for me because I do it for a day job and have for 27 years and you are 100% correct to get the best out of people in photography, you actually have to get to know them a little bit and nothing fake as well. Really good point you made.
Nev Clark wrote:
"I would even go as far as to say if you are a wildlife shooter now and you can't shoot birds I would find another hobby. Seriously it's not difficult ..... "
Based on the fact that you wrote that, I suspect that you are not a bird photographer. Is that a correct assumption?
With bird photography, getting close enough to wild birds, even with an 800mm lens, is typically very difficult. No matter how one goes about it, it almost always entails great effort of some fashion or another.
Getting close enough to birds for good photos may involve setting up blinds in strategic areas, getting into the blind well before the sun comes up, and waiting for hours, shivering in the cold, until the birds come in ..... only to find that they came in to a spot a few feet away from where you expected them to come in, and thereby not offering good photos, so then you have to wait until they leave, reposition the blind, remove distracting vegetation in the foreground and/or background, then get up very early the next day and try it all over again. Repeat daily until you finally get the birds right where you want them for frame-filling distance, no foreground obstructions, and a clean, distraction-free background. Nothing easy about this process at all.
Or getting close enough may mean establishing a feeding station, which means placing seed out in various areas, waiting days or weeks until the birds find the seed, then replenishing the seed every day to keep the birds coming in, and setting up a blind close to the seed, finding attractive perches to set up in just the right position relative to ambient light source and background, and then spending hours in the blind each day, waiting for the birds to land on just the right part of the perch and strike just the right pose. This is exactly what I have been doing daily for the past 11 days. Nothing easy about it at all.
Or getting close enough for a good bird pictures may mean traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to a destination where the birds are used to human proximity, then paying for lodging and meals away from home, all of which requires quite an outlay of research, time, and money.
Over the past several years, I have taken many dozens of bird photos that I am pleased with, but I can not think of a single one that was easy. Each and every quality bird photo I have gotten took a lot of strategizing and/or planning and/or time and/or patience and/or endurance and/or physical effort.
Photography is not too easy.
We shall politely agree to disagree because the advancements in auto focus and auto detection focus and subject detection have made bird photography very very and I'll say it again. Very easy....... the only challenge is finding the birds but if you know the right areas you're good to go especially with the modern gear. Remember we shot sports and birds with film cameras. You should go and have a go at that one time. You will never complain about your modern gear ever again. Yes getting to locations is challenging but that's the same for a wedding photographer or a landscape photographer or any photographer that has to travel to a destination but the actual photography part with the modern tech that's in cameras. It's not difficult to shoot wildlife anymore, it was 10 or 15 years ago but not now.
Nev, the actual taking of the photo has never been the difficult part of bird and wildlife photography.
Getting ones self close enough and in a good position is usually insanely difficult. Meaning that you actually have to be insane to endure all the difficulties that must be endured to get photos that are of true quality.
You say "very very easy". Are you a bird photographer?
Autofocus and subject detection have nothing to do with making the hard part of bird photography any easier. Those things do not somehow teleport you to within 12 feet of a warbler, or to within 9 yards of a shorebird. And those camera features do not make you invisible to the birds, either.
You are talking emphatically about something that you do not even do.
I have common winter birds here in my town, just a mile from my house. And it took me 5 days to get a photo this good of a common everyday Junco. Setting out the seed, waiting 5 days for the birds to find it, replenishing the seed daily once they found it, sitting there on the cold ground next to the fallen log that I put the seed on, for 2 to 4 1/2 hours each day, waiting and waiting for a Junco to land in just the right spot so that there were no distracting bits of twigs or leaves behind him. And needing one to land within 7 feet of me, so that I could take images in which the feather detail was well resolved. Taking hundreds and hundreds of photos that weren't quite good enough, for some reason or another, until finally, after 17 hours of sitting in one spot (spread out over 5 days of shooting), the right image appeared through my lens and I finally got a good photo of a Junco.
That is what it takes to get a good bird photo, not some junk that needs heavy cropping, or that has the bird's head turned slightly away, or that has some bit of vegetation behind the bird that is incongruous with the rest of the background. Autofocus or eye detection or camera technology has nothing to do with any of those things I just mentioned. And yet those are the things that must be done to get quality bird photos.
I would like to see you get a very high quality frame of a truly wild bird, and then after you finally get one, I bet you won't say that it was "very, very easy".
It is best to save the big loud opinions for things that you have actually tried and done yourself, at a high level. Then you will have the right to talk about whether they are easy or not.
Great image mate. Yeah I agree with what you're saying around difficult getting close enough . I'm purely referring to getting photos in focus and with de-noise software we don't have to worry about noise with higher ISO. I live in a wildlife sanctuary area but I'm actually not a wildlife shooter but I have shot birds and it is challenging but it certainly not challenging with the newer cameras and you auto subject detection. Definitely not the latest. Canon R52 is incredible.
White crowned sparrow
The detail from this original RAW file blew my mind. I realized rather than an image of a sparrow this was a study of the sum of feathers that make up a sparrow. The detail so great at 100% every rachis, barb and even the interlocking pattern of barbules are all visibly sharp, at 200 - 300% magnifications not only sharp but countable if one hand a mind too.
Yes, this is the kind of perfectly resolved feather detail that we have been longing for for decades. Even since I started shooting birds with film in the mid-1980s it frustrated me that I could do everything right, spend hours and hours in a blind, etc., and still not get satisfying photos because the smallest feather details were never present.
High quality, fine art bird photography is still unbelievably difficult and time-consuming, but at least nowadays, with the current gear, when we do put forth all of that time and effort and ingenuity, we get satisfying results.
High level bird photography has not become any easier than it was 40 years ago*, but the results we get have improved dramatically.
*with the exception of birds in flight, which is a whole different genre and requires different skills, gear, methods, etc.
I personally find this arrival a bit limiting in scope/focus (note this I my personal perspective and give it only as thought provoking ). I use photography as a tool to assist me with the creative activities including story telling and promoting thoughts. As such I don’t call myself a photographer, but I do use photography as one of my tools for creating meaningful (to me) unique images of ordinary things (as opposed to ordinary images of unique things). The camera/post processing are things in my toolbox and not standalone things. As Ansel Adams said then asked what was the most important aspect of his work (camera, lens, darkroom, ????) his response was “the 12 inches behind the viewfinder”, ie, your mind.
The camera plays a meaningful role and I am supportive of any activities/processes that make my efforts easier. I use my camera to capture information/data which I will in turn use towards creating my own unique images. Note: I use AI only to manipulate data I have personally captured and do not use any new data from other’s images. Specially, I do not use generative AI to create new data.
Certainly pay attention to what technology can help you with, but never forget that a truly “good” picture most probably starts in your mind.
Thanks for listening to my rant - Vince. Vincehigbee@gmail.com
It’s yet another case of ‘the three blind monkeys’ and their description of an elephant! If you don’t know about it, go look it up. The basic idea is that your take on a situation is dependent on where you are standing in relation to what you are describing. The problem being is that most people, when describing a behemoth like photography, are doing it from a very restricted position, resulting in a pretty limited and distorted view of what they are describing. This article is one such example. Personally, from where I’m standing, I don’t recognise this description of photography one bit.
Photography, or let’s be more accurate, the act of taking a photograph, has been easy for over 100 years. ( let’s not confuse the two) Ask any user of the original Box Brownie when it was released in 1900. What could be simpler with zero controls to think about? It was the original point-and-shoot. Though while it may have made taking a photograph simple, it did not make photography simple. It is as it’s always been, difficult. The author displays their own confusion and shortsightedness by imagining buying a camera has something to do with photography! Sure, it can help to have one, but that mercantile process has nothing whatsoever to do with what photography is. I would argue that compared to 1900, the act of taking a photograph has never been more complex than it is just now……… for some. For others, it’s just as easy as it was in 1900. For Box Brownie, read any point-and-shoot on auto or mobile phone. For others, the complexity can be overwhelming. Complex camera setup, memory card management, shooting in RAW, computers, display calibration, storage options, photo library backup, WiFi, processing applications, AI, etc., etc…. The photographic biosphere today is as complex as you wish to make it, but again, it and its complexity, or not, has little to do with photography and what it is! Photography sits outwith all that hardware decision making and other process-based guff. Photography is as it’s always been about creating images. In reality photography resides, within the mind of the photographer. All the hardware is just a means to an end. Do you think Picasso and all his creativity had something to do with his choice of paints and canvas? Do you think the industrial manufacture of paints made art any easier? It may well have enabled Monet and his pals to paint outdoors with paints now in small metal tubes but any artistic vision was located in the minds of the artists and not with any hardware they used. Confusing taking a photograph with photography is easy to do if no thought is put into what photography actually is.
Eric Robinson wrote:
"Photography, or let’s be more accurate, the act of taking a photograph, has been easy for over 100 years. ( let’s not confuse the two) ..... "
Eric, I am so glad that you wrote that, and you are spot on with what you say.
As a bird photographer, I spend an unbelievable amount of time scouting, establishing feeding stations, building blinds, paddling a canoe upstream agains strong, cold currents, getting up at 2:45am to drive an hour and then hike another hour and then wait in a blind for hours more. And quite often, I do all of this work and never get a good photo. Every now and then it all comes together and I do get a satisfying image, but only after hours and days of effort.
So, when someone like Nev Clark comes on here and says that bird photography is now "very, very easy" because of cameras with great autofocus and exposure tools, it frustrates the hell out of me. Focusing and exposure were never hard, even with film.
The hard part of bird photography is not - and never has been - the actual taking of the photo. Rather, the excruciatingly difficult part is getting one's self and one's camera in position to take the photo.
As you state, taking a photo and photography are two entirely different things. So different that there is really no correlation between the two. The two things don't really even have anything in common. I think that Nev Clark has been very misguided in thinking that photography and taking a photo are the same thing, or at least thinking that they are similar to each other. What errant thinking!
For real bird photographers, our goal is NOT to "get a photo of a bird that is in focus and exposed properly". Those things are a given, taken for granted. Of course our photos need to be in focus and exposed properly. But they need to be so so so so so much more than that.
We need the background behind the bird to be complementary to the bird, rendered in a way that causes the bird itself to "pop" out of the frame. And the colors of that background should be complimentary to the colors of the bird, relative to the ambient light and color temperature that we are shooting in,
We need the framing of the image to be aesthetically pleasing. That often means that we need the vegetation around the bird to be arranged in a certain way, so that the amount of space between the bird and the vegetation, and between the vegetation and the edge of the frame, is not awkward in any way. This means the photographer can do everything right for days, and still fail to accomplish his goal because the bird is too close to a twig or a blade of grass. Or because a pebble behind the bird is not out of focus enough, and therefore a visual distraction.
I could go on and on and on about all of the things that are REQUIRED in order for a bird photograph to be satisfying, but I am getting tired of sitting here typing and I need to go replenish the feed at one of my feeding stations and go to a location up north to set up a blind by some meat scraps that a butcher dumped in the sage brush - I hope to photograph Magpies and Eagles there. So instead of sitting here writing out all of the other things that must be done on order to get a bird photo that is good enough, I am going to get to work!
For me, I think the big consideration here is about the barrier of entry to the art of photography rather than the ease of taking a photo. As others have pointed out, just taking a snapshot or straightforward picture has been relatively easy for a long time. I remember my early days with basic point & shoot film cameras, dropping the film off to be developed. I had no creative control around the processing aspects, and honestly didn't understand the art of photography enough (or at all) to care. I didn't connect with photography as an art because the barrier to produce it was quite high.
Dropping the technical barrier to entry -- no longer needing a dark room, etc. to control the processing aspects -- is where new technologies have helped the most. As someone who's taken advantage of that, I think it's pretty great! The beautiful thing to me is that it's relatively easy to pick up a modern camera or smartphone and start a photographic journey....but that journey can have quite a long tail, and can continually present new opportunities for growth. "Easy to learn, hard to master" is a phrase that comes to mind. Intentionality with our art is something that we all have to cultivate, and harder technical processes don't automatically instill it in my opinion 🙂
Justin, your article captures an important discussion about the balance between accessibility and artistry in photography. While technology has certainly made it easier for anyone to pick up a camera and create, I think the real magic still lies in intentionality and vision. Convenience doesn’t automatically replace creativity—it simply shifts where effort is applied. As you point out, tools like AI and modern software can either be shortcuts or powerful extensions of an artist’s vision, depending on how they’re used. The challenge isn’t just about how easy photography has become, but how we as photographers choose to adapt and maintain purpose in our work. Great piece—thanks for sharing this perspective!
Paul Tocatllian
Kisau Photography
www.kisau.com
Your welcome, glad you enjoyed it!