Photography is what I want to do for a living. It is my chosen form of art. Therefore is pisses me off when people dismiss it as a simple point and shoot activity that any dumbass with a camera can do. Whoever thinks this obviously has no idea about aperature and depth of field; they have never tried to comprise the light situation because they want more of the picture in focus. They have never been bent over their black cat exposure guide in the middle of the night. They have never spent more than 50 bucks in their lifetime on camera equipment. They will never wake up at 7 am just to get the perfect lighting. They have never slaved over a roll for hours only to load it wrong and get nothing in return. They will never spend countless hours in a darkroom test stripping an uncooperative yet beautiful negetive. They have never knelt in mud for the perfect shot. They know nothing of filters and tripods and the rule of thirds. They may have heard of Ansel, but they couldn't tell me about his black and white spectrum. To them "stop" and "fix" are both verbs and not nouns.

Just because you can get some alright shots with your digital camera doesn't mean that I don't work my ass off for my art.

Sorry, I had to get that out. It seems to me that photography is always the kicked around art form. We never get into museums and everybody seems deluded that they could produce great photographs themselves.

“There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.” Alfred Stieglitz, 1893