How Photography Reached the Masses, and Became Noisy as Hell

Regarding the internet, Clay Shirkey once said, "When we saw the immense prospect of the web, we all thought it would be this great thing of truth and knowledge. What it really did was give everyone with a mouse a really noisy voice."

Photography is much of the same, as technology has advanced the medium and its art in to mainstream culture, a new age of blurry selfies and mediocre images of landscapes dominates photography as well as social media.

How did an art that was synonymous with excellence become so dull?

Henry Matisse said, "Creativity takes courage." It does indeed take some gusto to purchase a thousand-dollar camera. But the real courage comes from learning the gear and the craft. And that is where photography has become noisy.

We tend to take for granted, our cellphones and our internet. We can look at a painting we have never seen before. Viewing it in a virtual gallery is not at all like a brick and mortar museum, but the convenience allows us to experience history like never before.

Today, we can view photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams, without ever leaving the living room. We forget that the medium itself has only been around for less than 200 years.

Experiments in the 19th Century using silver compounds resulted in the birth of tangible and timeless photos. Henry Fox Talbot of Britain and Louis Daguerre of France patented two separate processes in the 1830s and 40s that are considered the beginning of modern photography.

By the late 1880s, photography in everyday culture was reality with George Eastman's Kodak camera, affordable and including a 20-foot roll of paper film.

For most of the 20th Century as documented art, photography was an artists only medium, catering to those who could afford a capable camera and could master it. The Kodak cameras were great for family snapshots, but what we saw in galleries and magazines was photographs made with expensive and complicated cameras.

In 1909, the United States National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to photograph the workplace. The documentary aspect and quality standards were very high.

Ansel Adams set up massive tripods for exquisite landscape shots and Bresson was a genius at capturing candid moments, and both had costly gear that had no "Auto Mode."

This lofty regard to standards would continue until the latter part of the century, until the World Wide Web would bring the entire world to an instantly connected and distributed internet, accessible around the clock, all year-round.

As the internet grew, the novelty of sharing our photographs also grew.

And then it began. The race for the best photos included cameras AND phones. Cellphones have nice cameras in them. Mirrorless cameras called "point & shoot," flooded a market eager to purchase cheap cameras that were capable of decent pictures.

Even the single-lens reflex cameras are now affordable. And DSLR technology builders made the 35mm format easily understandable.

It didn't work. At least not from a quality standpoint. Sure, more people were interested in photography now, and they did produce nice images, but what this technological and economic explosion really created was a crowded landscape of out of focus portraits and life photos. Selfies that were framed horribly and blurred kids' sports photos are noticeably saturated on Instagram and Facebook, in bleak contrast to the artistic photos we used to see in magazines.

Folks at concerts and ballgames continuously post poor photos of themselves and of the entertainment. The industry has done enough in the way of education, as YouTube and manufacturers have ample instructional video to watch.

So why the endless pages of garbage photos?

Simply put: Laziness. The manual that came with my Canon 7D is about half an inch thick, with very fine print. I think I read it eight or nine times front to back. I refer to it occasionally. Things like Partial Metering and setting up Wireless Flash Functions are topics I sometime need to brush up on.

Knowledge of your camera is essential to good photographs. Learn your mirrorless camera, know what aperture is on your DSLR, and realize that shooting a phone means "Sports or Action" modes for a fast shutter.

As I mentioned before, the availability of photography tutorials should have advanced the artistic percentages of the widespread snapshots that exist today. Apple's iPhone has a devoted following and many outlets for crowd-sourced sharing of information.

But generally speaking, phone photos are still mostly garbage. And many if not most of the other photos I see on Facebook and other social media, are also the throw-away variety.

Two ways to solve this dilemma are apparent:

1) Camera manufacturers can upgrade their equipment. Phone cameras need faster shutters and better low-light technology.

2) The second is really about a higher standard of appreciation. And that means that we learn our gear and focus on the bigger picture: Great Photos.

YouTube, camera manufacturers, and retailers, all have literature and video to help you progress from garbage photos to printable works of art.

Invest in knowledge and enjoy photography.