With the advent of extremely high-resolution screens (4K for now, but just down the road 8K as well) not so far away, many people will have a really bad surprise.
DISCLAIMER: Please do not take this post too literally: it is meant to provoke. Obviously there are out there on the various platforms many many really great artists; I just think their number is vastly overestimated, and that today we tend to use the word “artist” too lightheartedly.
I’ve heard repeatedly and from many sources in the last years that photography skills have improved big time, that there are many more exceptional photographers now than in the last 50 years and many a Flickr / Instagram / whatever star has been ascended to the same status of a Cartier-Bresson or an Ansel Adams, at least in the words and minds of their followers.
Now my question is: have you tried looking at those images, when available, in full resolution? And no, I don’t necessary mean at 100%, just at something a bit bigger than the postcard sized images we are accustomed to in these days.
My unscientific conclusion is that, at least for landscape photography, 99.99%* of the times they suck. Hard. Sorry. They don’t suck. They SUCK (yes, all capital letters).
In no particular order:
- no one seems to know that the aperture controls not just the exposure, but the depth of field as well. There is a gigantic amount of landscapes shot at f/1.8 for no particular reason, with just a couple of millimeters in focus in a scene 1 kilometer deep
- no one seems to care for a tripod, part 1, judging by the number of images shot at 8.000 or more Iso that look like impressionistic paintings (in a bad way)
- no one seems to care for a tripod, part 2, judging by how many people are convinced that they can shoot at a 2 seconds shutter speed handheld and have sharp images (hint: they cannot, not even with IBIS)
- ok, you want to shoot handheld at f/1.8 400Iso and 1/4000s, but please at least have the decency of using both hands to keep the camera steady. The number of images with tons, not just a hint, of unintentional camera shake is staggering
All these supposedly new exceptional artists will discover that they are basically wasting hard-disk space as soon as they will try printing any of their work on something more than a 10 x 15cm / 4 x 6″ sheet or, like I said, as soon as the new high-resolution displays will become mainstream. An 8K display, to give you a sense of scale, requires a 36Mp images to fill it up.
It’s extremely ironic that now we have cameras capable of poster-sized prints, but all the majority does is looking at tiny stamps on a low-res screen or shooting something that will be enlarged no more than the pictures we were used to take back home from a lab in the ’70s.
*Ok, I might have exaggerated the amount a bit 😉
I agree with you that many of the pictures people put on social media are craptastic quality, but that’s not the point, is it? They are merely sharing their lives via a photo. There are many people who value their photography and understand the difference.
Regarding resolution and 8k monitors, who views photos in full screen any way? When I peruse photos online I rarely view them fullscreen. It’s only pixel-peepers and technical trolls who do, and again, that’s besides the point of even the most qualified professional photo.
Hi Mark, sorry for the (big) delay in answering but this comment somehow didn’t show in my notifications, I just stumbled on it!
Yes, social media are here to let us share our life via a photo. But the people I was talking about are more ambitious, both in the way they present themselves and in the way they present their pictures. They are the ones you said that should “value their photography and understand the difference”.
I’m not a pixel peeper, but using a camera like some of these people do just doesn’t make any sense, because these kind of defects will be visible even WITHOUT going full screen as soon as better displays (4k will suffice, plenty) will become the norm.
And besides, some of these have the intention of selling prints as well…