EDIT: okay, the person I replied to deleted their post. I can see why, as they had replied directly to something I had edited out of my original post, on account of me trying to cut back on my DCQ (daily cynicism quotient). No hard feelings. Anyway, uhhh, not sure if my post makes much sense now, but I'll leave it in anyway.

Heh, I'm always interested to see the ways people internalize my username. It's meant to be a personal reminder "there is always someone smarter than me, and I'm not entitled to my job." It's meant to be a foil against my cynicism, thus why I put it in my username, which I see every day. But cynicism is really just ugly criticism, and if I recognize it in time, I can turn it into constructive criticism.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting just tossing a blurry cat photo on to everything (though in the right way it could be done... I digress). But the barrier to entry for creating decent-enough photos has dropped significantly in the last 10 years.

You are right, you have to ask yourself what you want to get out of the photo.

As a photographer myself, I don't think my time is worth anything. The value of my photography is not a function of the time I put into it. I might need more time to take a certain photo of a certain quality than another photographer, or I might need less time. That doesn't change the value of the photo. We're not talking about factory work. All creative work is valued independently from the time and effort spent on it. While we can make rough correlations between "time spent" and "quality", the two are not linked one-to-one, certainly if we're considering a marketplace of creative workers and the output they produce. One person's 15 minutes could eclipse another person's 1 week.

There are differences that the artist cares about and there are differences that the consumer cares about. And it hurts to hear it, because we've spent thousands of dollars on camera gear, but most consumers just don't care about the technical quality of the camera, beyond a certain point.

There are some who do. But I'm not convinced most do.

Most people do not see photography as art. They see it as another form of diary keeping. I get this all the time when I'm out with my camera. "Why are you taking a picture of that bug, who wants to see that?" or "Why don't you want a picture taken of yourself to commemorate the moment?" I see it constantly, most people (except other photographers) are completely perplexed by my photography motivation. "You've got hundreds of gigs of storage space, why wouldn't you take millions of photos?" Because then I'd have to look at millions of photos, and they'd mostly be junk.

One particular moment stands out in my head. I was in the Galapagos Islands, and we were near the end of the trip. Our guide took us on a tour of a research center on the main island. We had just spent two weeks looking at iguanas and turtles and lizards in the wild, and now we were in a glorified zoo to look at iguanas and turtles and lizards. Now, I don't mind getting to look at more animals, but I left my camera on the boat for this trip, and didn't regret it. The rest of the people were almost freaking out, "how could you leave your awesome camera behind? I bet you're kicking yourself right now." Why? We're not seeing anything new, and I can't take an interesting photo of an animal in a cage. (I'm not saying it's impossible, I just know that I can't for the parameters of the situation).

Most people, even people with expensive cameras, don't understand photography as art.

Look at the wedding photography industry. I am willing to bet that the people who pay for expensive photographers (who do spend a lot of time working, I do not doubt that) are either sinfully rich and make a habit out of buying the most expensive things, or are photographers themselves, amateur or professional. I did, because I knew I would care about the quality. Most of my friends did not, and freaked out about what I would have considered even cheap prices. They wanted a log, not an art book.

We can see the quality difference between a blog on Medium with a really nice photo that was taken with care. We can say "yes, this is good". But for every one of those, there are probably 10 teenage girls on Tumblr who is posting grainy iPhone photos of their cats with twee sayings MS Painted on top, with 100,000 followers each.

So back to my point: if what I want to get out of my photo is "drive clicks", it doesn't really that much matter. If what I want to get out of my photo is "sell units", it's actually better to have a lot of photos than it is to have great photos. If what I want to get out of my photo is "respect as a photographer", then of course, I will spend time on it.

But I don't confuse that for "selling units".