Anonymous #2 4w

I think it’s a classist take. Before I bought myself an expensive camera I spent years practicing changing my iPod/iPhone camera settings and editing by hand in Pixelmator. My Canon is so much easier now

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Anonymous OP 4w

That makes a lot of sense, i don’t want to make it seem like you have to buy an expensive camera to be a photographer i just think it’s important to distinguish the effort photographers go through for their art vs my dumbass pulling my phone out and taking a picture. For example i play guitar but i would hesitate to label myself a musician because like Prince was a musician and I am nowhere near that level of skill like i haven’t earned the title yet.

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Anonymous #2 4w

It’s ok to be a hobbyist instead of a professional musician 🤷‍♀️

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Anonymous OP 4w

Never heard of a hobbyist before but yeah i agree i just don’t think i would call someone only doing it as a hobby the same name as someone doing it professionally is all

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Anonymous #2 4w

Somewhere over the rainbow was recorded in one take at 2am. Prince’s guitar solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps was never rehearsed and done in one take. If someone is making an effort to compose their shot or creates a well composed shot it shouldn’t matter the tool. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my camera equipment, people that gatekeep the hobby ruin it for some novices, just let people enjoy what they’re doing without the criticism

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Anonymous #2 4w

A hobbyist what you are when you enjoy something but aren’t ready to put the time and commitment into turning it into a profession. Like most photographers, and musicians, and artists

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Anonymous #1 4w

Sorry I’m not trying to gate keep the hobby by any means only the title. i just don’t think that simply taking a photo makes a photographer you do gotta be passionate about it and i do think at minimum i would expect you to have a camera that’s not attached to a phone it could be any camera idc it could be a disposable one i just don’t think phone camera when i hear photographer.

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Anonymous #1 4w

Is hobbyist like a tier before a photographer then? or is it like you can be a hobbyist and a photographer?

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Anonymous #2 4w

Dude I studied photography in college at one of the most prestigious, photography programs in the country. My senior exhibition Advisor is one of the most accomplished artist in the history of the medium and I did my entire thesis exhibition shooting developing and printing 8 x 10 and 4 x 5 color and black and white film and I believe that someone can take just as good of a picture if not better on a flip phone then someone can on a 8 x 10 which is what “the pros” use overwhelmingly for pics

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Anonymous #2 4w

A photographer is whatever you want it to be it’s about the intentionality behind the picture and not the technicalities of what camera was used. And I say all of this having had the complete pretentious elitist college experience

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Anonymous #3 4w

W. Now I’m curious who you studied under and what your exhibition was

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Anonymous OP 4w

I studied under Stephen Shore at bard college (which is not even an arts college it’s a liberal arts school) so I also needed to study other subjects. He alongside William eggleston essentially made color photography into a respected art form. Before the two of them all fine art photography was black and white. I think Stephen is also the only living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the MET in nyc. Funilly enough, Eggleston’s grandson who’s also named William also went to Bard.

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Anonymous OP 4w

And my senior thesis was an exploration of industrial decay and abandonment in relation to the notion of american exceptionalism. I photographed all over the rust belt and also wrote some accompanying literature here are a couple of pictures from the collection

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Anonymous OP 4w

And now I’m working with my publisher in Italy to get some of the work from the exhibition into a photobook featuring other young international photographers

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Anonymous #3 4w

That’s so awesome, I’ve been particularly fixated on New England’s industrial decay, my senior project is about the renewal of those sites, and they’ve been some of my favorite photos to take

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Anonymous #3 4w

Thats’s so cool!!! One day I want to photograph computing and data center waste as a warning for my whole profession. Maybe throw in some digital image processing to capture information outside of the visible light spectrum

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Anonymous #1 4w

Ohh hell yeah. Show me some, I’d love to see. It’s interesting what a long term project can shape up to be.

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Anonymous #3 4w

This was just for a personal passion project in partially, but I took a bunch of historic images around one of the cities I was stationed in and blended them with something modern

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Anonymous #1 4w

I love the tones in this really evokes the emotional coldness of abandonment and architectural decay. Color to me is honestly such a difficult concept to truly master and understand which is why most of my work still is in black and white but I’m trying to work on my conceptual understanding of natural and artificial lighting and how to manipulate those factors into making a better picture.

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Anonymous #1 4w

Oh did you take this picture? I’m noticing the cars look really old? Oh is this like a split image kind of thing? Really cool

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Anonymous #3 4w

Yeah, I took the top half of it after finding the old bottom half. (I basically just recreated some archival photos around my museum and made then-and-now edits for them) here’s another I recreated

2