Opinion

Here’s something to ponder this weekend: what will happen to photography in the future? To help celebrate World Photo Day – which is Saturday, August 19th, COOPH has weighed in with 10 predictions.

We share a lot of photography tips videos by travel photographer Pierre T. Lambert but today’s tutorial is a bit different from the rest. First of all, it has a very provocative title: “Why Your Photo Suck – And Mine Too.”

Photographer Pierre T. Lambert wants to debunk a photographic myth. No, you don’t need to shoot in manual mode to take better photos, he says. It’s actually a lot more important to hone your photographic vision and not get bogged down in stressing over technical skills you might or might NOT need.

Do your friends often tell you that your photographs are so good you should become a professional? Do you sometimes stare blankly at the pages of National Geographic and hear a voice inside your head that says, “I can do better than that!”? Do you post on Instagram more than 70 times a week? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on—and unleash the master picture-taker that’s lurking in your soul.

Is Instagram still a good place to share your photography or has it been taken over by annoying short-form videos, aka "reels," much like one of its main rivals, TikTok? Or to put it more bluntly, is Instagram dead as a platform for serious photographers?

One of the most enduring and ubiquitous axioms in photography is that it’s the photographer behind the camera, not the camera itself that creates the image. Or, as one guy commenting on my recent article "My 10 Favorite Film Cameras" trenchantly put it, “In the end, the equipment you use doesn’t mean squat.”

This question has been bugging me since I first looked into the waist-level viewfinder of a Yashica D twin-lens reflex camera more years ago than I care to admit. I haven’t been more than three feet away from a camera since then, and clearly I am neither artist nor scientist. Explore a couple differing points-of-view with me and then please leave a comment and share your opinion.