Has the bar been set too low

I don’t make a significant amount of my income from photography or photography-related ventures but I sometimes wonder if we, the photography-consuming world, have set the bar too low in our expectations of the “professionals”.

I put professionals in quotes because I believe the term professional photographer has become a very loosely defined title. We have loads of “professional” photographers who are weekend warriors. Please don’t get me wrong, there are lots of very good part-time professional photographers who work their photography business as a sideline. Where I believe we set the bar too low is when it comes to people who are charing money or items of value who, often admittingly, have no clue what they are doing.

While I may no longer be working as a professional photographer I still belong to a number of groups and organizations that cater towards the working professional. I see posts and questions on a daily basis regarding situations or issues that are very basic. We all have questions from time to time. It may be something we’ve never encountered before. As an example a few weeks ago a “professional photographer” posted some examples of photographs taken during a family portrait session and they couldn’t figure out why everyone was so dark. The photographs were taken outdoors, on location, during daylight hours. A quick look at the photographs it became apparent that the camera had likely been set on a matrix metering as the background, which was likely very bright at the time, was well exposed with no blown highlights or overexposed areas but the people in the foreground were much darker, near silhouettes. Several other members pointed that out to the person posing the question. It isn’t that the photographs were the issue, the issue, to me, was the photographer didn’t know what “went wrong”.

I don’t mean to come across as an elitist, I certainly don’t intend to sound as such. I just believe that before one begins to call themselves a professional there is a particular level one should reach beforehand.