We Live in a Photo Utopia

eric kim sukhee chung mom

Dear friend,

There is no other generation or time to be alive to be a photographer.

Everything is free

We live in a photo utopia.

Consider this — almost everything we do now in photography is free.

Most of us have smartphones, which have “free” cameras embedded in them.

Most of us have access to the internet, which allows us to publish our photos online for free.

There are many photo apps and services that are free to download— that can store our images (Dropbox, Google Photos), that can post-process and edit our photos (VSCO, Snapseed), and ways we can share our photos for free (Facebook, Instagram, etc).

We have access to all this free information to learn photography (Google searches, YouTube, free ebooks, etc).

What else is holding us back in our photography?

Ourselves.

Our own lack of creativity. Our own lack of confidence in ourselves. Our own lack of finding personal significance in our photography.

Nothing is holding you back.

We always think we’re lacking gear. We think we’re lacking opportunity. We think that we’re lacking personal ability.

But in reality, nothing is holding you back.

Remember, the point of life isn’t to become a great photographer. The point of life is to live a great life.

That means that photography is a tool to enhance your personal relationship with the world. For me, I consider the camera as a sociological tool, to better understand society. I see “street photography” as applied sociology— with a camera.

What will we lack in photography in the future?

In the future, where all smartphones will take photos as good as DSLR’s, and when photo storage is free, computing power is free — what will we be lacking?

We will lack compositional and framing skills. We will lack confidence approaching and photographing strangers. We will care too much about the opinions of others on our photos. We will obsess too much over our social media following, likes, and the amounts of comments we get. We will lack the feeling of satisfaction, or gratitude.

What should we focus on in photography?

Consider— what will change in photography, and what will not change in photography in the future?

For me, I think technology in photography will constantly change, and evolve.

But what we need to focus on — making our photography more personal, to build confidence in ourselves, and to care less about what others think about us.

So friend, to empower you, here are some resources which can help you: