Contrary to what some pretentious photographers may think, I believe that photography should be insanely easy. Better to automate the technical things, and the more you could focus on just shooting and having fun, the better.

Why is there the cult of hard?

My thought is this: nerds like to make things hard, because it is a way of them to assert their power over others. For example, most budding photographers just want to go out and have fun. Yet insecure nerd photographers want the whole world to do everything fully manual, in order to need their services to teach them how to use manual settings.

Also, there is this strange thing that we have in the western world is that the harder something it is, the more virtuous it is. Difficulty and hardness is related to notions of pain and overcoming, and that which is not painful is not worthy. I believe this to be a generally Christian notion: pain and suffering is related to virtue and justice.

Therefore, if you do something that which is not hard, you are somehow “cheating“.

Also, when you do something the easy (and more effective) way, others who do it the hard way and inflict self pain to themselves hate it when they see you do it the easy way and therefore feel indignant. Others want you to feel the pain that they do.

Or others believe that their way is the only and the most supreme way, and they want the whole world to do things their way. Some people get angry when they see that you do things different than their way.

Can you imagine trying to teach your kid to shoot fully manual photography?

Can you imagine that your kid who wants to learn how to make photos, that you sit down and board them to death we’re trying to explain to them how to shoot photography fully manually? This would be insanely boring.

I suppose the difference is in fact, let us say that your kid wants to learn how to shoot photos fully manually, because the technical things are personal curiosity to them. However, one should not force a new photographer to learn fully manual settings for the sake of it. Often the technical aspects of photography is overrated.

For myself, When I started photography, I had zero interest in the technical aspects of photography. however, I did want to learn practical things like how to make my photo darker or brighter. or how to shoot black and white photos. Therefore my lesson is this:

Teach people the simplest way to achieve their desired outcome.

For example, let us say that A photographer wants to learn how to make their photos brighter or darker. Rather than trying to teach them the exposure triangle, better to just tell them to shoot in program mode, and use exposure compensation plus or minus to make their photos darker or brighter.

Teaching the simplest method takes the most skill

Some of my friends who are coders tell me this: the difference between a good and great coder is that a great coder is able to achieve the desired effect with less code, simpler, and cleaner code. Call a weaker coder will be able to do the same desire defect, but with more code, more loops, and more complication to achieve the desired way.

For example, let us say you want to turn left. You could just turn left, or you could turn right three times. Certainly more effective to just turn left.