Simplicity: Ken Rockwell hits this one out of the park

This is a true article written by one of photography's original thinkers. Love him or hate him, Rockwell has a brain that he isn't afraid to use. A lot. Some of his positions are controversial, and some are right the hell on. Like this one:

Simplicity:

"Worse, photography is leading amateurs down the path of eternally crummy pictures by giving them more completely irrelevant distractions, like 'should I shoot raw?,' 'maybe I should try shooting in AdobeRGB,' or worse, 'Maybe I should spend 30 minutes shooting 500 shots from the same tripod holes so I can stitch and HDR and panfocus them together later.'

Because our brains are distracted by this, we aren't thinking about the picture or the subject.

The dumbest thing people do is spend those 30 minutes making 500 exposures to stitch together, instead of spending 30 seconds looking for a better angle, better composition or better location that would actually result in a better image.

Shooting it is the easiest part; seeing it is the hard part.

If you make the shooting so difficult that it takes up all your effort, you have no time left to concentrate on seeing your picture in the first place.

If you spend little to no time looking for a good image, no matter how much effort you put into actually shooting it, it will still suck."

Read the whole thing. Now.