God I'm sick of snide pseudo-artistic snobbery.

There is photography as an art and then there is photography as a hobby. Please stop conflating the two and, what's worse, judging those who indulge in such a hobby.

Do you "need" an expensive rig to take family, vacation, hiking, etc photos? With certain exceptions clearly not. As such snobs like to point out, the likes of Ansel Adams did quite well with pretty basic gear. We know. We don't care.

The simple fact is that a DSLR still does things that a compact camera does not:

- larger sensors by the laws of physics will have shallower depths of field making shots possible that just aren't physically possible on the small sensors typically in compacts (let alone phones);

- high ISO without being awash with noise;

- generally speaking, faster continuous shooting. This is important, at least to me, because I typically take a burst of 3-5 shots because the first will suffer most from camera shake and it increases the chance of getting a good shot;

- a flash gun is vastly more versatile, particularly in being able to bounce flash to avoid red eye (yes I know some "prosumer" cameras have a hot shoe); and

- an optical viewfinder, particularly in lowlight, is vastly superior to any electronic viewfinder.

- the metering/AF (particularly continuous AF) are significantly better.

I don't own a 5D Mark II. Personally, I can't justify the cost. But I do own a 7D+15-85 and I've previously owned a 20D and a 300D. Not because I need them or because I have delusions about making some great artistic statement but because I enjoy them.

Fact is, I earn a good living. Buying a 7D (or even a 5D Mark II) does not represent a massive investment. I have to wonder if the self-important pseudo-artists who like to rant about people like me are, at least in part, jealous of this economic freedom that we engineers enjoy.

I also have an iPhone 4S. Bear in mind I also bought the iPhone 4. I largely bought the 4S for the better camera. As well as having reasonably decent image quality it also addresses the burst fps issue I have with compacts and phones, to the point where I will in the future have trouble justifying buying another compact.

In my experience there are two kinds of artists. The minority are true artists, who tend to live on a blurry line between genius and madness, often so oblivious to things and people around them (since they're obsessed with their vision) that they probably wouldn't even notice what tools other people use, let alone would complain about them.

The second are what I call "lifestyle artists". These are people who aren't really artists but are simply attracted to the lifestyle. They socialize with other "artists", are often "hangers on" to true artists and write blog posts like these. They're the kids in the playground who pick on the unpopular kids just to affirm their social status among the "popular" kids.

It's not that these people realize they're frauds (IMHO). I'm sure they truly believe they're artists. They just don't know the difference between being a true artist and "going through the motions".

This isn't unique to the art community either. There are a lot of pretend engineers out there. These are the sort who will often get into wars about Python vs Ruby or Django vs Rails or jump on the Java-bashing bandwagon like it's some kind of street cred. None of these things matter.

Perhaps these failed artists should spend less time whining about the financial successes of others and more time figuring out why they're failed artists.