Good photographers are actually pretty rare and - in my experience - treat the field of capturing visual information as a science, but since the advent of consumer DSLR and mirrorless systems, modern-day digital cameras with nearly instant automatically-focusing lenses that utilize a grid array and intelligence models to smartly maintain clarity on what is most likely a subject as it moves in 3D space, have made it so much harder to fuck things up that it essentially has opened the floodgates of photography so that there’s an endless sea of morons thinking that buying a $5000 Canon with a full-frame sensor and a lens the size of a Stanley cup makes them Ansel Adams.

It’s the same with any field where the bar to entry gets suddenly lowered. The market becomes immediately flooded with new “experts” because the tools evolve to the point that they become nearly idiot-proof. Think Claude vibe coders calling themselves programmers / software engineers, Gemini prompters calling themselves visual designers, and people on SoundCloud uploading jingles they farted out on SUNO calling themselves musicians.