I want to warn you from the start – this is a rant. I don’t rant to often, so please bear with me. As it is the case with any business, photography has its good moments and bad moments. If I meet with a client who wants me to slash my prices in half because she found someone of Craigs list who will photograph an entire wedding for $500.00, I get understandably upset. When people come up to me in coffee shops when they see my camera and tell me how they are photographing weddings with their digital Rebels, I get really frustrated. When Panasonic released its ill-fated Lumix camera commercial that featured an exhibition by a photographer who did not know the first thing about photography, I did not know whether to laugh or throw a shoe at my TV.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that there are days when I love photography and I want nothing more than to go out and shoot. And, there are days when I wonder why I ever picked up a camer in the first place. Recently, I came across two opposing (kind of) views on photography. Well, they are not really opposing, more like the whole cup-half-full vs. cup-half empty thing… CNN ran an opinion piece by a Los Angeles-based news photographer Nick Stern where he ranted and raved about the decline of photography as a profession and about how apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic actually cheat the viewers. A few days after reading Nick Stern’s piece, I came across a blog post by Allen Murabayashi, a co-founder and the CEO of Photoshelter. His blog post was titled “Rant: I Love Photography”; in that post Allen spoke out against all of those who complain about this and that in photography. His message essentially was “Stop moaning and complaining, grab a camera and take some photos”. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this rant (I really wanted to make a point when I started writing, but now I forgot what it was). However, if you have any interest in photography, these two opinions are really worth reading and show two sides of the same coin. Oh, and as an added bonus, I found out that Ken Jeong is a medical doctor. Wow!