Please post your results and the professionals for us to compare when you do.

“Anyone need any heart bypasses doing? I’m not a surgeon, but I’ve got a scalpel from the craft shop, a GCSE in needlecraft and I’ve watched Casualty. Bosh.”

I’ve taken 10,000 photos in the last 10 years. I know nothing about photography but in spite of that some of those were pretty good and three of them good enough to sell to a mag – one was printed over two pages.

If I take a shit photo nobody dies.

So if you’re prepared to do a load of bypasses, and you’re happy nobody would be harmed and by fluke some might be a total success then why not?

no reason why not at all!!

point is you took 10 000 photographs over 10 years to get three saleable shots… which would be a rough way to make a living! 🙂

I’ve got some lovely pens here and some paper. I reckon with a decent book, half a day scribbling I could do as well as a professional illustrator.

I could probably draw portraits of people for a living, but if I showed them the portraits then asked them for money that would basically be blackmail.

I’ve got a thousand monkeys…

Do you have a typewriter?

My wife is a professional portrait photographer. She is wonderfully talented , works really hard and has trained in it for years . She makes a nice tidy sum from people like the OP 🙂

I’ve taken 10,000 photos in the last 10 years.

You’re not even trying! I took 3000 this morning shooting a single hockey match!

A photo every 1.5-2 seconds. 😯
There should be at least one decent shot in that lot.

A photo every 1.5-2 seconds.

10/11fps frame rate

There should be at least one decent shot in that lot.

Hit rate is about 1 in 25. You get a lot of scenes obscured when another players runs in front of the action and blocks the view / steal the focus and a lot of scenes never come off and there’s nothing worth shooting in the end. Very much a numbers game….

Best of the bunch here https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/albums/72157673924468051

In case anybody is in work on a Saturday, poah’s link is NSFW

Hit rate is about 1 in 25. 😯 You get a lot of scenes obscured when another players runs in front of the action and blocks the view / steal the focus and a lot of scenes never come off and there’s nothing worth shooting in the end. Very much a numbers game….

Best of the bunch here https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/albums/72157673924468051
There’s some decent shots in there. 😉

In case anybody is at work on a Saturday, poah’s link is of a lovely lass with a cracking arse and is well worth looking at later.

There’s some decent shots in there.

Cheers, ought to be getting the hang of it by now, must have shot about 100 matches…

it wasn’t all tits and ass

also used to shoot film with an EOS5 and a bronica ETRS

Anyone need any heart bypasses doing? I’m not a surgeon, but I’ve got a scalpel from the craft shop, a GCSE in needlecraft and I’ve watched Casualty. Bosh

I think we all accept the following- its stw so i know we wont but well you know.

1. A trained professional will do a better job than someone having a go
2. Some tasks are more complicated than others
3. Some tasks are more safety critical than others
4. Some tasks an amateur can have a decent go at

IMHO Photography covers both 1 and 4 so decide how much you wish to pay for 1

Heart surgery is most definitely 1,2,3

Its not really a fair comparison

In much the same way I could paint a wall I cannot paint a Banksy or a da vinci

We had some family portraits done, and very nice they are too, which they should do because they were powerfully expensive. My wife and I felt at the time that my probably would actually have spent more if the pricing model had been different. We payed £x00 for 4 framed shots in the end but that’s because it felt like the sweet spot for value, not because that’s the budget we had in mind (we didn’t have a budget really).

Personally do not care for studio portraits, which does not help…

There’s probably something out there you would like molgrips.

Certainly would not like a portrait of myself on my own wall!

“Yup. Get her a hot girlfriend.”

Should I take intimate photos of them together myself or get a professional to do it?
What, and miss all the fun? Are you completely mad?! 😯

🙂

I’ve started a fork and shock tuning service.

It’s taken a while to really get to grips with, but for a tenner a time, I think it’s good value.

Unfortunately, I can only tune them to G# at the moment, but I’m much cheaper than those shysters at LOCO, TF etc.

Anyone need any heart bypasses doing? I’m not a surgeon, but I’ve got a scalpel from the craft shop, a GCSE in needlecraft and I’ve watched Casualty. Bosh

Overqualified if you ask me. Plus Theresa May is looking for big cost savings in the NHS, you’re probably just what she had in mind…..

FWIW, I’ve taken photos at two weddings, one was my cousin’s registry office wedding, she just wanted some photos to remember the day. I was a bit worried about disappointing her, but she was thrilled to bits with the results.
The second was an ex-girlfriend who is also one of my best friends, who’s first wedding had the reception at a fairly swanky location in Castle Combe, with a bunch of her Chinese relatives flying in from Malaysia, and she wanted some photos of the day that were less formal for them to take back home.
I took a bunch at the church, then more at the formal reception, took the films into Boots for their 1-hour processing service, had a load of sets run off, then dashed back for the less formal do.
The relatives, and the bride and her immediate family were beyond chuffed with my efforts, because the photos showed a more relaxed and playful side, and were available to be taken away on the day.
The professional photos are there to be treasured, but as the couple are now divorced and my friend has re-married, it’s possibly fair to say the memories are somewhat bittersweet, regardless of who took the photos.
Anyone who things all you do is chuck a RAW file into Ps or Lightroom, hit F1 or wherever you have a set action stored, and bingo! Robert’s your mother’s brother, you have a perfect image is sadly deluded.
I saw my job as a scanner operator and Ps retoucher in print prepress disappear almost over night with the advent of digital cameras and cheap desktop scanners bundled with Ps Lite, because, armed with those tools, and a couple of books from WHSmith, everyone became a bloody expert!
And the results were painfully obvious in magazines I saw on the shelves in Smiths.
You want a good result? You pay someone to produce it.
If you only want to pay peanuts, get a chimp to do it.

Wtf was wrong with that photo, it was a link and it’s not porn. :boggle:

Sorry, I’m still wrangling with the concept that you have a dSLR, have taken 10,000 photos (an average of three a day) and by your own admission “know nothing about photography.” I can’t get my head around that. You’d be better off with an iPhone.

As for the assertion that you could do as well as a professional yourself because you’ve had photos published, either you’re being modest and selling yourself very very short, or you got lucky once and are deluded and overgeared.

A dSLR in and of itself takes higher quality images but does not by any stretch of the imagination take good photographs.

Rubbish, a film SLR cost a fraction of what a DSLR does now.

In fact without DIY post processing, my £20 film SLR produces the better images (because someone at the printers is doing the post processing).

I really don’t think that either of those is true. I think mid 1970s an OM1 was about £250 and an OM 2 was £350. £3,000 a year was a wage back then?

The Nikon F4 was released 1988 and cost it cost about $2000 dollars

On the second point if you go through our albums I’d say that even my first 4mp camera produced better prints than the film prints we had before. You could argue that the digital ones still have faults

Once I’d bought a DSLR and lens (6mp) and started doing mu own post processing I was wiping the floor with the film stuff every time

I had one of my pictures as double page spread in Velovert magazine a few months back. I guess that makes me a professional?

Oft said that photography is 30% skill, 30% equipment and 30% luck (the other 2% is maths- you need to know the rule of thirds).
10,000 shots to 3 published falls short on that one. I’d aim for a 75% success rate and have 3 or 4 published per week.

As for the film vs digital argument, I’d say that digital being an improvement is subjective and depends on the type of image. What is beyond critisism is the fact that more skill was required to take good film images, unless you had an endless pot of money. It was mentioned earlier that a bucket load of photos can be taken at an event for next to no cost or nearly £300.00 in film alone. It’s no contest.

Anyone who things all you do is chuck a RAW file into Ps or Lightroom, hit F1 or wherever you have a set action stored, and bingo! Robert’s your mother’s brother, you have a perfect image is sadly deluded.

As for this comment it pisses both me and my Uncle Bob off! 😈

(the other 2% is maths

Is that irony?

I used to do a lot of gig photography.
Pre digital, getting money out of musicians was virtually impossible.
Post digital, it’s a complete waste of time.

I’ve had so many nicked and reused by others I just don’t bother anymore, even for free for mates and relatives.

My only claim to fame as a photographer is getting punched in the face at a party by Elaine Constantine.
And I’d completely forgotten about that ’till someone reminded me at a funeral yesterday.
🙂

Is that irony?

Always, except the Bob thing, he really is my uncle which makes replying to it truthfully difficult (and possibly ironic too).

We had a professional shoot done as it was given to us as a christmas present, I hated all the staged shots so we only ended up with the photos that were included in the package. Then I bought a DSLR and spent a lot of time learning how to use it, now get to take as many shots of the kids as I like and end up with plenty good enough to hang on the wall, I can also update them as often as I like.

I do admire the work of some of the professionals, but there is no way I could afford any of the ones I would be prepared to have hanging on the wall.

OP, I think the angle to take with your wife is as follows:

“look all those photos will cost £500, why don’t we have a fantastic family day out/ weekend away and I’ll take my big camera and loads of photos of the kids. If none of them are any good we’ll go back to the pro”

How could she say no? And if you actually have a holiday the photos you take with attached real memories will bodyslam the fake studio shots.

Wtf was wrong with that photo, it was a link and it’s not porn

Maybe not, but certainly NSFW as I pointed out – and some people might not want pics like that popping up on their screen when they innocently click on a link whether or not at work. FWIW I didn’t have a problem with it and didn’t report it – though I’m not really sure what it added to the thread.

Professional photography mostly existed because of technical and cost barriers that have long since gone

Hilarious.
As a photographer I’m so glad I don’t have to hawk my skills to the general public as on the whole they are a nightmare!
Owning a violin doesn’t make you a violinist etc etc.
That said a lot of high st/social photography is dire and I wouldn’t pay a penny for it, the good ones (photographers) tend to charge enough that the tight arses don’t bother asking and those who can afford it don’t ask either 🙄

We had a gift card for a local photographer a couple of years ago. Booked him he turned up at our house and took some photos. All good. A couple of weeks later we asked what was happening with the photos. Photographer in New York atm will get in touch when he’s back. 3 weeks later. Where are the photo’s we ask after a call to his office, Just sorting them out he says. 2 Days later get a phone call, no photo’s the memory card is corrupt. (yes of course it is). Can you re arrange for another shoot. Sure how about next weekend? That’s fine. Next weekend comes, but the photographer didn’t. Ad infinatum. Never did tell my my mum that Phil Garland Photography from Longridge stole from her.

MrSmith – Member
Owning a violin doesn’t make you a violinist etc etc

Spot on.

My wife cares little about photographic equipment and less about formal theory.
Yet her images are usually excellent.
She has a very good eye.
My pictures are usually technically spot on, yet lack soul, compared to hers.
In terms of composition and spontaneity, she’s a natural, whilst I have to work at it.

We hired a pro for the eldest daughter’s wedding – a newbie with excellent people and compositional skills, but little technical knowledge.
Fortunately, the student she’d brought with her as an assistant, shy young lad who was a bit nervous ordering people around, turned out to have a wonderful feel for light and exposure and knew his kit backward.
They made a very effective team.

The camera has little to do with it – it’s a box with a hole in it.
Creating brilliant images requires a knowledge of how to pick the most suitable kit and get the best out of it, but if you can’t organise yourself and others, recognise and capture that crucial moment, you might as well not bother.

That’s what you pay for.

Rusty Spanner

The camera has little to do with it – it’s a box with a hole in it.
Creating brilliant images requires a knowledge of how to pick the most suitable kit and get the best out of it, but if you can’t organise yourself and others, recognise and capture that crucial moment, you might as well not bother.

That’s what you pay for.

As well as creating images with often overlooked attributes like focus, lighting and composition a pro will also be relied upon to show up on time and produce images of events that may not be repeatable. Everyone understands the importance of their wedding photographer getting the job right, but that pressure and those demands are applicable to most shoots.

I’d love to see a wedding photographer hand over a few hundred out of focus, under lit badly framed shots and explain to the client that the quality doesn’t matter since it’s all about memories.