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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LensWork" data-source="post: 4076" data-attributes="member: 1283">It's not just wedding photography, it's all manner of professional photography that has become more competitive. In the days before auto focus, it used to take some real skill and hand-eye coordination to shoot sports; few could do it really, really well. Setting the correct exposure at night/indoor sporting events was also a learned skill, what with the dark backgrounds and white uniforms there was a certain level of experience needed to know proper exposure to keep a white uniform from washing out while still maintaining good shadow detail under the bill of a player's cap. News photography has also changed. With everyone having a camera in their cell phone, more and more news outlets are using images from amateurs and most of the time these individuals are happy just to see their image published without any sort of compensation. This has caused news outlets to lower the amount that they pay pros; why pay a pro when Billy Bob will gladly give an image to their local paper for little or nothing? I quite often see news organizations report a "breaking story" and asking if their are any viewers in the area to e-mail their pics in. Digital has certainly made the pro's job easier in many ways, and also made it possible for the consumer to get the news much faster. No need now to leave a game after the 7th inning, or in the third quarter to get back to the office to process the film and print it to make the deadline for the morning edition. Many pro stadiums have T1 jacks right in the photo well so you can just plug-in and upload between innings. With wireless transmitters it's possible for an assistant to capture images in  real-time in the press box and send them out for immediate posting on the web while the photographer keeps shooting. During the Vietnam War, images that appeared in the paper were often shot days, or even weeks before they could be published. Photojournalists would have to get the film to Saigon, then from there it would be sent to London/Paris/New York for processing. Now with satellite uplinks, images from the Iraq war could be posted within a few minutes of being captured.Digital and auto-everything cameras have allowed photographers to concentrate more on the subject, and less on the technical aspects, as well as opened up photography to many very creative individuals who otherwise might have been put-off by complex cameras. At the same time auto focus, auto exposure and digital capture seems to have instilled a "spray and pray" mentality for many with an "I can fix it later in Photoshop" approach to basic photographic skills. Don't get me wrong, it still takes a great amount of skill to produced a truly remarkable image, but today's cameras have made it much easier for many to get really good images without much (any) formal training or commitment to the art of photography.</blockquote>

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