August 16, 2020

Photography now is not for the faint of heart. Where it once was a brotherhood of respect for the photographers working to make great images for the stock photo agency it now has turned its back on the very artists that made the agency successful. And lets face it, it is now all about money for the investors at Getty, ShutterStock and Alamy! So while the photographers sweat in exhaustion to create good imagery the agencies lower the financial return for the image creators. This puts an unfair burden on the photographers that need to make a living to pay their personal bills and to continue to go out and make unique imagery that will sell.

It is the same story all through the American economy.
Money flows up the ladder to the powerful never down. The money men have turned their backs on the photographer giving them peanuts on the dollar for their hard earned efforts while the photo agency sucks up billions in revenue off our hard earned talent.

Once agencies introduced RF imagery it was only a matter of time before Rights Managed imagery was abandoned. We have entered the fast paced life of our future economy. Where people don’t look for the beauty that surrounds them, the beauty that is being destroyed from pollution and new buildings exploding across our country and the world so the wealthy can look down on the masses and feel themselves above the peons scrambling to make a decent wage to survive. These ego’s of unrelenting greed, the new gods of avarice.

We must keep a focus on new ways to make a living from our unique perspective. Our ability to see in an ordinary scene something that catches our eye and in that moment of realization the drab scene becomes alive with possibilities and you become immersed in the scene tuning out all the distractions that surround you and you are focused on details that illuminate your intuition and your composition will be endlessly discussed but you see the entirety of your personal vision as your subject was taking shape and being created.

All image creation can be interpret differently from the photographers point of view that is what makes photography so important. We see through our own private vision and what works for one creator might not work for another. It is called art and art is always open to discussion and personal interpretation that is what sustains the artist, his creation being looked at,
studied and analysed.

We must not feel that every image we take will be perfect. And It will automatically reveal to the viewer what your unique vision was. Each of us have our own unique qualities of perceiving the external world, our own intuitive force that alerts us to seek a certain train of thought, a photographic idea we are drawn to. Contemplating your subject is the starting point of experimentation before you hit on the composition that reflects your inner mode of seeing the subject with fresh eyes.

When we seek perfection we end up with mediocre images. But when we go with the flow, have an open mind to just look over a scene without trying to fit the landscape into a standard copy of someone else’s published image we are allowing our imagination to guide us to our true potential, we have made our beauty where it didn’t exist.