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May 03, 2007
[ MUMS WITH CAMERAS ]
“Buying a Nikon does not make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” Anon
And very wise, too.
Back in the early sixties our friend Keith was a commercial photographer. A substantial part of his income came from taking wedding photographs.
Keith was deeply troubled by the sudden ubiquity of the single lens reflex camera. He reckoned that all those Pentaxes and Nikons, and even the old-fashioned Contaflexes, bode ill for his profession. He feared that once the amateurs got their hands on some good gear they would be able to do it themselves and the profession of photography would be doomed. He needn’t have worried.
A photographer is not a person with some expensive gear. A photographer is part artist and part craftsperson plus experience. Photographers know things about light and composition that is either intuitive or the product of learning by doing.
We were reminded of Keith’s professional panic by a recent article in the New York Times about Mums with Cameras – a phenomenon so widespread that it is now an acronym, MWAC. (Needless to say they write Moms but we haven’t succumbed to that one yet.)
The Professional Photographers of America report that more and more women are buying top quality digital single lens reflex cameras to take snaps of their kids and find they are so good at it that they set up in business. As most of the photos of children are taken with available light there is no need to buy elaborate lighting systems. And where once the darkroom, or at least the professional photo laboratory, was an essential part of the professional’s gear these days a good quality inkjet printer hooked up to a computer is enough equipment for photo processing.
Perhaps this time around the professionals have good reason to be scared. The American pros don’t like the way the women undercut them on prices. It does seem to be unfair competition when the hobbyist undercuts the people who have to make a living from the job.
But the good news for pros making a living from weddings is that the Mums with Cameras give the nuptials a miss. They recognise that they lack the experience needed to get all those clichéd poses just right.
There have always been women experts at portrait photography. In the 1860s and 1870s Julia Margaret Cameron was taking portraits of her famous friends, Tennyson, Darwin, Browning, Carlyle and so on, and inventing the art of portrait photography. She used a cumbersome wet plate camera and had to handle all the technical work of preparing the plates and processing the images. Her subjects had to sit still in her chook house studio for long exposures and it seems she had some special rapport with them that makes their humanity and personality glow in these great photographs. She was an original artist. It’s hard these days to be anything but an imitator. Any MWAC should study Cameron’s portraits. No one has ever done it any better. Except perhaps Dorothea Lange or Margaret Burke White.
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Posted by terry at May 3, 2007 01:24 AM
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