Today 6 billion of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants – approximately 86% – carry mobile phones. Most of those phones have cameras. This means that most people in the world have a camera on them at any given moment. This means that almost everybody in the world has the ability to be a photographer. So all they have to do is grab their phone, take a quick shot, and it can be shared with with world in just seconds after capture. There is good and bad to this immediacy. Some old school folks will lament the lack of craft involved and the lack of skill required and the minimum inve$tment needed to call yourself a photographer. Others will see that there is a benefit in this very fast feedback loop. You can shoot, post, and immediately see what you’ve captured and get immediate feedback and critique from the worldwide photo community. That feedback will be the thing that improves your photography the fastest. There is certainly something to be said for getting your hands active and getting into the darkroom, learning how to process film and develop the perfectly toned image. That darkroom time is about creating a base of fundamental understanding of light and dark in a very simple, basic way. You can take the lessons learned in the darkroom and apply them to “developing” imaging on your computer in Adobe Lightroom. I learned to photograph in the early 90’s with a fully manual film camera, shooting black and white film that I processed myself and burned and dodged the images onto light-sensitive paper. The process is...
