Everytime I open my Facebook I am inundated by all these photos people are uploading and calling themselves “photographers”.  They go out and buy an SLR, learn how to turn up the saturation and put on a watermark in Photoshop and bam they are suddenly deep brooding artists, “Wow you took a picture of the river bank in Saskatoon, how creative!’   I can only imagine the terabytes of this pretentious garbage that is being uploaded on a daily basis across the world.  A few of them are alright but a good portion of them are just stupid pictures with little to no artistic value but look nice because they applied a few eye pleasing filters that if done right take about 5 minutes to do.  Like really, do you need to a put a watermark on a picture of your cat?  I don’t think you need to worry about anyone trying to copy your stupid cat picture and calling it their own.  With Facebook’s convoluted terms of service and the questionable ownership of any content uploaded to Facebook,  I would think any self respecting photographer would avoid uploading anything to it.   It should also be noted that it is actually against Facebook’s terms of service to use your individual profile to promote your business and they have recourse to disable your profile.  You being a photographer because you bought a nice camera and know how to use Photoshop is like me being a DJ because I own an iPod and know how to use iTunes.

If a) people have paid money for your pictures b) You’ve been hired by a company as a photographer c) You don’t need to Photoshop to edit your photos into oblivion to look nice or d) You can tell me what the aperture, ISO and F-stops are then you might be able to call yourself a photographer.  Photo journalists who work for magazines like Life and New York Times can spend months trying to get that perfect shot.  Professional Wedding photographers can sometimes spend up to an hour working on each file making sure it’s perfect.  In order to demonstrate how easy it is to become a Facebook photographer I gave a few random photos I took with a $119 Sony Cybershot the “Wannabe Facebook Photographer” treatment which took in all about 15 minutes.

Here is a kid eating, nothing too special here.

Here are some trees, pretty boring

Ooooo, I'm a photographer!

Here is a photo of Saskatoon in the winter

Now with some simple colour correction and blur filters applied

A fall picture I took by the river bank

I'm so artistic!

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