Comment on business is business

• scrion@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s absolutely not. You can take perfectly fine, artsy photographs with a bunch of cheap gels and Chinese import lights.

  You’ll be shocked to learn that people took fantastic pictures before an $8.6k M.ZUIKO lens came into existence.

  Go ahead and tell me what a setup the likes of what Evans or Miller had at the time would cost today and stop putting art behind a paywall. Stock photography and repeatable product pictures are expensive, but that’s not art.

  Professional photographers have expensive equipment because it makes certain shots commercially feasible, not because it’s impossible to create art without money.

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  • Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Walker Evans famously shot with a Zeiss Contax I (among many other cameras) - which retailed for an inflation-adjusted ~$2,700

    I’m gonna stick with “art is expensive”. Yes, good equipment isn’t required to make art (a claim I didn’t make) - but the reason to have good equipment is because you don’t have to fight your tools to get the results you want. Sure, I could fuck around with gels and can lights to get the cool effects I want - but unless I have a stack of ~2.2 million gels, a Westcott RGB point-light is going to be both more capable and critically less time consuming so more of my time is spent doing art than it is futzing around while my model slowly wilts. Similarly, you can produce incredible paintings with a stick and chewed berries - but the time spent going out to pick a bushel of pokeweed, then process that into a usable format, can’t be excluded just because it’s a more authentic process. Don’t be an elitist about what constitutes art, either - stock photography is absolutely an art form even if you sneer at it.

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    • scrion@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think eventually, you’re saying the same thing. If you want to shoot professionally, it makes sense to get equipment to save time and have a manner of control over reproducibility. That’s also why the local metal shop gets the $200 carbide endmills vs. grinding HSS blanks by hand. I did state that already.

      I’ll still disagree with two things. You absolutely did say “art is expensive”, and stock photography will not produce a lot of art. It can be shot artfully, sure, but that’s more of a word choice and eventually rather equates to craftsmanship. I’m sure there is at least one stock photographer out there, producing art all the time. Same with any amazing shot that happens to get uploaded to a stock library not becoming any less meaningful. But that’s not common and simply not how the process works, claiming anything else would be disingenuous. I’m not out to disparage the craft or the skill of anyone involved, that’s a completely different topic.

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      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Did something happen in the past 86 years that now makes it impossible to shoot the same, great pictures with that camera?

        Well, yes? The massive infrastructure built to support film photography disappeared. It’s an incredibly expensive medium now.

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  • distal@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is true, it’s the need for consistency that drives up costs.

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