In the eye of the beholder, holy crap it's a beholder, RUN! ARgh it's killing me with it's eye! NOOOoooo.....

I just heard a guy say "yeah, I was at home and took a picture of my silverware, sold it for a million." He was referring to a picture on the wall that is a dining room set. It is black and white and in my opinion really, cool. But that's because I'd say I respect the things that go into a picture. Then I started to think about if some people use art as an outlet or just a means to make money. If you could sell something you made for 1,000 dollars would you? Probably, right? But what if it took you a day to make and you could make the art everyday for the rest of your life? Then you are "selling out" in my opinion. But a lot of people do that. They take pictures everyday and if they end up with one that they can reprint and sell, they have a living. I think, at least in our times, the ability to take a picture and sell it are phenomenally high. I can take 1,000 pictures and have them on the internet the same day. Out of 1k pictures, there just has to be one or two for me to recoup the cost to charge my battery and the time it took to shoot. It seems kind of unfair to the photographers of old who dedicated their lives to learning all the finer points of development and the physical work needed to make a picture. But it's still art. It hasn't changed the quality per say, just the amount, and as a result of that, the noise and signal ratio. Of course, there is the limiting factor in price of high quality equipment to take the pictures. I don't have a very expensive camera and so I am limited to taking close range shots and so if you put the money in, you have an advantage. But even that is shrinking with cheaper digital SLR cameras. Camera phones are starting to be higher quality than digital cameras were four years ago. So, can we say that the picture you took isn't art if you didn't pay big for a camera? No, of course not. But there is already so much extra fluff out there that I feel the professionals are loosing their foothold in photo publishing.