Excellent post. Technology may give people hope that they don’t have to put in the hours, days, weeks and years, same as the promises made by dubious sellers of elixirs, claiming to cure all. You gotta earn it, and the price is time.
These workshops serve the professional and promotional goals of the instructors as much, if not more, than the paying registrants.
Do them for the fun of the shared experience and to add new inspiration to your pursuit. But keep in mind that there are no shortcuts to mastery, and no better teachers than practice and repetition. Lots of it.
Great post, Cedric. When I retired I started watching YouTube videos posted by "photographers" but it soon became apparent that many (not all) were thinly disguised gear / software advertisements. Only a few offer(ed) something interesting / thought-provoking / inspirational.
To be fair, coming from a film background, I was interested in replicating, as far as possible, the look of certain colour films and looks for black and white conversions. I'll freely admit that I did buy a few preset packs which actually proved very useful as starting points for where I wanted to get to. The reality is that, without the presets, I could have spent months trying to get to that starting point. As you can see what the originator has done to the various sliders, you can learn and experiment from this.
Knowing where you want to be when you've processed the photo is the crucial bit. A lot of photographers don't start from that position, so t's easy to be seduced by the shiny and the new - and still end up as clueless as when you started.
What Finally Changed My Photography Wasn't a Preset—It Was People
I found myself nodding along while reading Stop Being Exploited. The article highlights a problem that almost every photographer encounters at some point: the endless marketplace of promises.
Every day we're told that the next preset pack, the next online course, the next YouTube channel, or the next "secret workflow" will finally unlock our creativity. The advertisements all sound remarkably similar:
"Become a better photographer in 30 days."
"Master light with my exclusive presets."
"Shoot like a professional by next weekend."
If only it were that simple.
Like many photographers, I've fallen for those promises. I've purchased presets because I admired someone's portfolio. I've signed up for online courses that seemed like the perfect fit. Sometimes I learned something useful, but more often I found myself collecting techniques instead of developing vision.
Eventually I realized something important.
Photography isn't learned by collecting recipes.
It is learned by learning to see.
No preset can teach you how morning light changes across a flower. No video can replace standing in the rain waiting for the clouds to open. No workflow can explain why one portrait moves people emotionally while another, technically perfect image leaves them feeling nothing.
Those lessons only come with time.
But I would add something to the original article.
While shortcuts don't exist, good mentors absolutely do.
Finding a mentor may have been the single most important step in my own photographic journey. I was fortunate to meet people who were generous with both their knowledge and their time. They weren't interested in selling me the latest editing trick or convincing me that success could be bought.
Instead, they asked questions.
Why did I make this photograph?
What was I trying to say?
How could I improve it?
Sometimes the conversation lasted five minutes. Sometimes it continued for months. Each discussion taught me far more than another preset pack ever could.
A mentor doesn't have to be a world-famous photographer.
In fact, they often aren't.
A good mentor is someone who understands the craft deeply enough to guide you honestly. Someone who encourages curiosity instead of imitation. Someone who celebrates your successes, challenges your assumptions, and helps you discover your own artistic voice rather than copying theirs.
Equally important is finding the right community.
That has become surprisingly difficult.
There are thousands of photography groups online, yet many become competitions rather than places of learning. Images are judged instead of discussed. Opinions are offered without explanation. Criticism becomes performance instead of education.
The communities that truly help photographers grow feel very different.
People ask questions without fear of embarrassment.
Constructive critique replaces harsh judgment.
Ideas are exchanged freely.
Different artistic visions are respected.
Members encourage one another to experiment rather than conform.
Those are the places where creativity flourishes.
Photography is already difficult enough. We don't need communities that make us afraid to share our work.
Perhaps the greatest lesson photography has taught me is patience.
Every photographer wants to reach the finish line tomorrow. We all hope our next image will be the one that defines our portfolio.
Art doesn't work that way.
Photography asks something of us.
It asks us to spend years learning light.
To understand composition.
To make thousands of mistakes.
To revisit subjects we thought we had already mastered.
One of the most rewarding experiences I've had is returning to photographs I made three or four years ago. At the time, I thought many of them had failed. Looking back with more experience, I now see possibilities I couldn't recognize then. Sometimes I re-edit them. Sometimes I return to the same location with new knowledge. Occasionally I discover that the image was always there—I simply hadn't yet learned how to see it.
That is growth.
Photography is not a race to become famous.
It is a lifelong conversation between yourself, light, and the world around you.
The internet will continue to promise shortcuts. AI will become increasingly convincing. Presets will keep being marketed as the missing ingredient. New courses will promise rapid transformation.
Ignore the noise.
Invest instead in patience.
Invest in books.
Invest in thoughtful critique.
Invest in genuine friendships.
Most importantly, invest in finding a mentor who believes in your curiosity more than your wallet.
Because in the end, the best photographs are rarely created by people who found the perfect preset.
They are created by photographers who never stopped learning how to see.
excellent post what people tend to forget is that photography is more than gear its a tool to use your voice. Learning from set lessons and trying to reproduce what that photographer taught is not gonna cut it. Your personal vision, your voice, looking at other artists, practicing will take your there but not in a weekend 🤩
Fabulous post, and I couldnt agree more on the phenomenom of some youtubers/social media accounts becoming some kind of misplaced educative voice to beginners. I noticed a certain british street/travel photographer was pumping out a significant amount of blog posts that were (poorly) A-generated, think lens reviews that were almost word for word similar, but had subbed out a paragraph here or there. It was content slop, indicative of a wider trend of pumping out lots of seemingly helpful/informative pieces that have no real value to the reader, merely disguising affiliate links.
The frustrating part is that it works. Those blogs are popular, those affiliate links get clicked, and the beginner who doesn’t know any better gets a superficially useful answer that teaches them nothing about how to actually understand hardware and where it actually fit in the practice of photography.
The wider picture is worse than content slop, though. It is the normalisation of treating photography as a set of consumer decisions rather than a practice. Buy this lens, use this preset, follow this formula. The entire machinery is designed to keep you in the purchasing stage and never let you reach the making stage.
I don’t know what an effective counterweight would be. I guess more showing that it’s not about the gear or the presets or the workflow helps. You see a lot of that happening on the parts of Substack I frequent: people use old gear, people use film, they don’t process, they discuss deadpan and similar ideas. Beginners need to be exposed to that.
Developing a photographer’s eye and personal style requires some soul digging. At least you should ask the question how much of yourself you aim to embed in your images. And then you should take the time to learn how to actually create what you have in mind.
That quest is what fascinates me about photography. I never understood why people would want to outsource that to an "expert." It is like buying a ticket for a roller coaster and then asking someone else to take the ride for you.
Roller coaster is a good analogy. I would add that the outsourcing problem is not just about experts. It is about the entire attention economy that has grown up around photography. The apps, the presets, the YouTubers, the gear reviews. All of it offers a version of photography where someone else has already done the thinking and the promise is that you can get there for some cash.
What gets lost is the specific pleasure of solving a visual problem yourself. There is a photograph you want to make, and you can’t find a tutorial for it because nobody has tried to make that exact photograph before. Figuring it out anyway is the whole point. I like to quote Feynman about that: “The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it... those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.”
At some point, following other people's instructions stops being learning and becomes a substitute for having your own ideas. I’m not sure where that line is, but there is definitively a line.
As a total amateur myself I can say the best advice I got was from an old friend who said “fill the shot and if you must leave a gap make it an interesting one.” It got me to play with either getting everything into frame by going over or under the object or tilting the camera to compose the image in a different way. I’m still playing with finding my style. I think that seeing it as play rather than aiming for perfection has helped me to understand my own personal style rather than aiming for someone else’s ideals.
"Fill the shot and if you must leave a gap make it an interesting one" is better advice than most photography courses. It gives you a constraint to work against, which is what beginners actually need. Unlimited freedom is paralysing.
Play versus perfection is also important. The search for perfection is what drives GAS and the preset industry. You don’t need perfection. You don’t need the hundreds of likes Joe Bloggs got for his last photo.
I find that most people who struggle with developing a style are not struggling with technique. Technique is easy. They are struggling to take themselves seriously enough to treat their own experiments as valid. Play is how you get there, but at some point you have to look at what you made during play and decide which parts matter. That step is harder because it requires judgment, and judgment only comes from having made enough bad work to know the difference.
The lady who gave me that advice is a professional photographer herself with several books published and I’m quite sure she’d agree with all your comments. She’s not keen on people charging loads of money for courses. She would give me advice and critiques on social media but always with a view that my work is very different to hers. She never once said “you must do…” only that - as you said - play leads to more serious approaches and a development of your own techniques.
Sounds like the industry works the same way as the self help industry. Just a bunch of people who are already successful ignoring the roles luck and privilege played in their success, and telling us if we buy their magic beans then we too can enjoy the same success
I’ve spent a lot of time studying images and looking at YouTube how-to videos. I’ve tried to replicate tutorials. Not because I wanted to make photographs like that but rather because I saw things that I wanted to learn how to do so that I could incorporate aspects into my own work.
Working toward one’s own voice is the journey worth taking. Listening to other voices as a sounding board is crucial to the process. What you are describing is how that gets flipped on its head. People are filled with anxiety about how their work is perceived because they want to be liked. When the likes don’t come they feel they need to fix something and there is no shortage of snake oil salesmen ready to sell guarantee solutions.
Transfer the anxiety about being liked into figuring out what is important to you. If you aren’t getting paid, then you are your only customer. Work toward what you want. Maybe it’s unfocused or vague. Maybe it changes. That’s you working on figuring out your work.
Techniques and gear should be in the service of your vision not fixes to it.
Great post Cedric. The mindset some learners have also shows up in photography groups and forums online. Questions like “what’s settings did you use” don’t take the conditions into account, or why those settings were appropriate, in most cases. They need to spend time, with trial and error. And in the digital age, that’s way easier than it was with film!
It's all-day the fact that it's the first question. If the first thing you think is what settings do this, you're not interested in photography. You're interested in gear.
Absolutely wonderful and well said. Photography had a barrier to entry back in the day. There were fewer things to control on the camera - shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and focus; then there was the "craft" in the dark room. Doding, burning, chemicals at specific temperature, these were the things that kept the masses from mucking things up.
Now, almost anyone can take a great photo or manufacture one via A.I. The craft has been degraded to a few clicks of a mouse or a slippery slider. The darkroom is now Lightroom and you can "develop and print" your film from the comfort of the same chair you sit in to play Call of Duty.
Yet, my love for the medium continues and I'll swim my way through the social media sharks and be like Frank and do it my way.
I asked a college photo class of 15 once what they hoped to take away from their class & not one of them had any idea. I believe that if you are so brain dead that you believe an “expert” on You Tube or the latest camera will fix your lack of ability you are getting what you deserve.
I agree in part with you. To me, a student who walks into a class without knowing what they want is not brain dead. They are a beginner. That is exactly where everyone starts. They might be curious, they might want to learn new things in the area of photography.
The problem is not the students' lack of direction. It is the industry that exploits that uncertainty by selling easy answers. The YouTube expert and the new camera are not fixing a lack of ability, as you say. They are cashing in on the fear of it people who are scared of uncertainty have.
So I would flip it. The student is not getting what they deserve. They are getting exactly what the industry wants them to get: a transaction instead of an education. More profit there. And I think that distinction is important because blaming the student lets the people selling the snake oil off the hook.
I agree BUT I would add that I would feel better if even one of them possessed the critical thinking skills to know they are being played. If even one of them had said they just liked taking pictures I could accept that. I also realize some of them were in the class to get an easy credit, but all of them? What kind of photographers will they be? They will be the kind waiting for the next new thing to come along so they can be exploited. Universities have scaled back photo programs and photojournalism majors are becoming extinct. Soon we won’t need them anyway. It will all be AI and thinking won’t matter at all.
When I started learning Lightroom I turned to YouTube and Instagram and quickly found people wanting to sell me $500 courses to learn all their secrets. The marketing is very aggressive and the main criteria of these “teachers” seemed to be having a few photos go viral. I stuck with what I could find for free and a lot of trial and error!
Excellent post. Technology may give people hope that they don’t have to put in the hours, days, weeks and years, same as the promises made by dubious sellers of elixirs, claiming to cure all. You gotta earn it, and the price is time.
These workshops serve the professional and promotional goals of the instructors as much, if not more, than the paying registrants.
Do them for the fun of the shared experience and to add new inspiration to your pursuit. But keep in mind that there are no shortcuts to mastery, and no better teachers than practice and repetition. Lots of it.
Great post, Cedric. When I retired I started watching YouTube videos posted by "photographers" but it soon became apparent that many (not all) were thinly disguised gear / software advertisements. Only a few offer(ed) something interesting / thought-provoking / inspirational.
To be fair, coming from a film background, I was interested in replicating, as far as possible, the look of certain colour films and looks for black and white conversions. I'll freely admit that I did buy a few preset packs which actually proved very useful as starting points for where I wanted to get to. The reality is that, without the presets, I could have spent months trying to get to that starting point. As you can see what the originator has done to the various sliders, you can learn and experiment from this.
Knowing where you want to be when you've processed the photo is the crucial bit. A lot of photographers don't start from that position, so t's easy to be seduced by the shiny and the new - and still end up as clueless as when you started.
What Finally Changed My Photography Wasn't a Preset—It Was People
I found myself nodding along while reading Stop Being Exploited. The article highlights a problem that almost every photographer encounters at some point: the endless marketplace of promises.
Every day we're told that the next preset pack, the next online course, the next YouTube channel, or the next "secret workflow" will finally unlock our creativity. The advertisements all sound remarkably similar:
"Become a better photographer in 30 days."
"Master light with my exclusive presets."
"Shoot like a professional by next weekend."
If only it were that simple.
Like many photographers, I've fallen for those promises. I've purchased presets because I admired someone's portfolio. I've signed up for online courses that seemed like the perfect fit. Sometimes I learned something useful, but more often I found myself collecting techniques instead of developing vision.
Eventually I realized something important.
Photography isn't learned by collecting recipes.
It is learned by learning to see.
No preset can teach you how morning light changes across a flower. No video can replace standing in the rain waiting for the clouds to open. No workflow can explain why one portrait moves people emotionally while another, technically perfect image leaves them feeling nothing.
Those lessons only come with time.
But I would add something to the original article.
While shortcuts don't exist, good mentors absolutely do.
Finding a mentor may have been the single most important step in my own photographic journey. I was fortunate to meet people who were generous with both their knowledge and their time. They weren't interested in selling me the latest editing trick or convincing me that success could be bought.
Instead, they asked questions.
Why did I make this photograph?
What was I trying to say?
How could I improve it?
Sometimes the conversation lasted five minutes. Sometimes it continued for months. Each discussion taught me far more than another preset pack ever could.
A mentor doesn't have to be a world-famous photographer.
In fact, they often aren't.
A good mentor is someone who understands the craft deeply enough to guide you honestly. Someone who encourages curiosity instead of imitation. Someone who celebrates your successes, challenges your assumptions, and helps you discover your own artistic voice rather than copying theirs.
Equally important is finding the right community.
That has become surprisingly difficult.
There are thousands of photography groups online, yet many become competitions rather than places of learning. Images are judged instead of discussed. Opinions are offered without explanation. Criticism becomes performance instead of education.
The communities that truly help photographers grow feel very different.
People ask questions without fear of embarrassment.
Constructive critique replaces harsh judgment.
Ideas are exchanged freely.
Different artistic visions are respected.
Members encourage one another to experiment rather than conform.
Those are the places where creativity flourishes.
Photography is already difficult enough. We don't need communities that make us afraid to share our work.
Perhaps the greatest lesson photography has taught me is patience.
Every photographer wants to reach the finish line tomorrow. We all hope our next image will be the one that defines our portfolio.
Art doesn't work that way.
Photography asks something of us.
It asks us to spend years learning light.
To understand composition.
To make thousands of mistakes.
To revisit subjects we thought we had already mastered.
One of the most rewarding experiences I've had is returning to photographs I made three or four years ago. At the time, I thought many of them had failed. Looking back with more experience, I now see possibilities I couldn't recognize then. Sometimes I re-edit them. Sometimes I return to the same location with new knowledge. Occasionally I discover that the image was always there—I simply hadn't yet learned how to see it.
That is growth.
Photography is not a race to become famous.
It is a lifelong conversation between yourself, light, and the world around you.
The internet will continue to promise shortcuts. AI will become increasingly convincing. Presets will keep being marketed as the missing ingredient. New courses will promise rapid transformation.
Ignore the noise.
Invest instead in patience.
Invest in books.
Invest in thoughtful critique.
Invest in genuine friendships.
Most importantly, invest in finding a mentor who believes in your curiosity more than your wallet.
Because in the end, the best photographs are rarely created by people who found the perfect preset.
They are created by photographers who never stopped learning how to see.
excellent post what people tend to forget is that photography is more than gear its a tool to use your voice. Learning from set lessons and trying to reproduce what that photographer taught is not gonna cut it. Your personal vision, your voice, looking at other artists, practicing will take your there but not in a weekend 🤩
Fabulous post, and I couldnt agree more on the phenomenom of some youtubers/social media accounts becoming some kind of misplaced educative voice to beginners. I noticed a certain british street/travel photographer was pumping out a significant amount of blog posts that were (poorly) A-generated, think lens reviews that were almost word for word similar, but had subbed out a paragraph here or there. It was content slop, indicative of a wider trend of pumping out lots of seemingly helpful/informative pieces that have no real value to the reader, merely disguising affiliate links.
The frustrating part is that it works. Those blogs are popular, those affiliate links get clicked, and the beginner who doesn’t know any better gets a superficially useful answer that teaches them nothing about how to actually understand hardware and where it actually fit in the practice of photography.
The wider picture is worse than content slop, though. It is the normalisation of treating photography as a set of consumer decisions rather than a practice. Buy this lens, use this preset, follow this formula. The entire machinery is designed to keep you in the purchasing stage and never let you reach the making stage.
I don’t know what an effective counterweight would be. I guess more showing that it’s not about the gear or the presets or the workflow helps. You see a lot of that happening on the parts of Substack I frequent: people use old gear, people use film, they don’t process, they discuss deadpan and similar ideas. Beginners need to be exposed to that.
Excellent article.
Developing a photographer’s eye and personal style requires some soul digging. At least you should ask the question how much of yourself you aim to embed in your images. And then you should take the time to learn how to actually create what you have in mind.
That quest is what fascinates me about photography. I never understood why people would want to outsource that to an "expert." It is like buying a ticket for a roller coaster and then asking someone else to take the ride for you.
Roller coaster is a good analogy. I would add that the outsourcing problem is not just about experts. It is about the entire attention economy that has grown up around photography. The apps, the presets, the YouTubers, the gear reviews. All of it offers a version of photography where someone else has already done the thinking and the promise is that you can get there for some cash.
What gets lost is the specific pleasure of solving a visual problem yourself. There is a photograph you want to make, and you can’t find a tutorial for it because nobody has tried to make that exact photograph before. Figuring it out anyway is the whole point. I like to quote Feynman about that: “The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it... those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.”
At some point, following other people's instructions stops being learning and becomes a substitute for having your own ideas. I’m not sure where that line is, but there is definitively a line.
As a total amateur myself I can say the best advice I got was from an old friend who said “fill the shot and if you must leave a gap make it an interesting one.” It got me to play with either getting everything into frame by going over or under the object or tilting the camera to compose the image in a different way. I’m still playing with finding my style. I think that seeing it as play rather than aiming for perfection has helped me to understand my own personal style rather than aiming for someone else’s ideals.
"Fill the shot and if you must leave a gap make it an interesting one" is better advice than most photography courses. It gives you a constraint to work against, which is what beginners actually need. Unlimited freedom is paralysing.
Play versus perfection is also important. The search for perfection is what drives GAS and the preset industry. You don’t need perfection. You don’t need the hundreds of likes Joe Bloggs got for his last photo.
I find that most people who struggle with developing a style are not struggling with technique. Technique is easy. They are struggling to take themselves seriously enough to treat their own experiments as valid. Play is how you get there, but at some point you have to look at what you made during play and decide which parts matter. That step is harder because it requires judgment, and judgment only comes from having made enough bad work to know the difference.
The lady who gave me that advice is a professional photographer herself with several books published and I’m quite sure she’d agree with all your comments. She’s not keen on people charging loads of money for courses. She would give me advice and critiques on social media but always with a view that my work is very different to hers. She never once said “you must do…” only that - as you said - play leads to more serious approaches and a development of your own techniques.
Damn course / camera / preset suite promised to take me to the next level, but here I am
Sounds like the industry works the same way as the self help industry. Just a bunch of people who are already successful ignoring the roles luck and privilege played in their success, and telling us if we buy their magic beans then we too can enjoy the same success
Amen.
I’ve spent a lot of time studying images and looking at YouTube how-to videos. I’ve tried to replicate tutorials. Not because I wanted to make photographs like that but rather because I saw things that I wanted to learn how to do so that I could incorporate aspects into my own work.
Working toward one’s own voice is the journey worth taking. Listening to other voices as a sounding board is crucial to the process. What you are describing is how that gets flipped on its head. People are filled with anxiety about how their work is perceived because they want to be liked. When the likes don’t come they feel they need to fix something and there is no shortage of snake oil salesmen ready to sell guarantee solutions.
Transfer the anxiety about being liked into figuring out what is important to you. If you aren’t getting paid, then you are your only customer. Work toward what you want. Maybe it’s unfocused or vague. Maybe it changes. That’s you working on figuring out your work.
Techniques and gear should be in the service of your vision not fixes to it.
Great post Cedric. The mindset some learners have also shows up in photography groups and forums online. Questions like “what’s settings did you use” don’t take the conditions into account, or why those settings were appropriate, in most cases. They need to spend time, with trial and error. And in the digital age, that’s way easier than it was with film!
It's all-day the fact that it's the first question. If the first thing you think is what settings do this, you're not interested in photography. You're interested in gear.
Absolutely wonderful and well said. Photography had a barrier to entry back in the day. There were fewer things to control on the camera - shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and focus; then there was the "craft" in the dark room. Doding, burning, chemicals at specific temperature, these were the things that kept the masses from mucking things up.
Now, almost anyone can take a great photo or manufacture one via A.I. The craft has been degraded to a few clicks of a mouse or a slippery slider. The darkroom is now Lightroom and you can "develop and print" your film from the comfort of the same chair you sit in to play Call of Duty.
Yet, my love for the medium continues and I'll swim my way through the social media sharks and be like Frank and do it my way.
Thanks Cedric - I look forward to your next post!
I asked a college photo class of 15 once what they hoped to take away from their class & not one of them had any idea. I believe that if you are so brain dead that you believe an “expert” on You Tube or the latest camera will fix your lack of ability you are getting what you deserve.
I agree in part with you. To me, a student who walks into a class without knowing what they want is not brain dead. They are a beginner. That is exactly where everyone starts. They might be curious, they might want to learn new things in the area of photography.
The problem is not the students' lack of direction. It is the industry that exploits that uncertainty by selling easy answers. The YouTube expert and the new camera are not fixing a lack of ability, as you say. They are cashing in on the fear of it people who are scared of uncertainty have.
So I would flip it. The student is not getting what they deserve. They are getting exactly what the industry wants them to get: a transaction instead of an education. More profit there. And I think that distinction is important because blaming the student lets the people selling the snake oil off the hook.
I agree BUT I would add that I would feel better if even one of them possessed the critical thinking skills to know they are being played. If even one of them had said they just liked taking pictures I could accept that. I also realize some of them were in the class to get an easy credit, but all of them? What kind of photographers will they be? They will be the kind waiting for the next new thing to come along so they can be exploited. Universities have scaled back photo programs and photojournalism majors are becoming extinct. Soon we won’t need them anyway. It will all be AI and thinking won’t matter at all.
When I started learning Lightroom I turned to YouTube and Instagram and quickly found people wanting to sell me $500 courses to learn all their secrets. The marketing is very aggressive and the main criteria of these “teachers” seemed to be having a few photos go viral. I stuck with what I could find for free and a lot of trial and error!
But yeah, great post!
The only instruction a photographer should heed: put in the work and know what you want to accomplish.