> > One angle to consider is that the tools (cameras, etc) have become > much better than in the past. This means that more and more > non-photographers are using the tools to turn out mediocre work. In > the past they would not have even bothered. So the overall body of > image quality would slowly go down hill a bit. These same tools in the > hands of a photographer who knows how to use them, can become much > more powerful and enables them to make more great images in less time > than in the past.
Precisely. It's the inexorable march of progress. There are many more bad drivers on the road today than there were 50 or 100 years ago. But that doesn't mean the best drivers of today are any worse than the best drivers of that period - it just means that nowadays driving is a commodity experience, not a rare skill. Similarly, there is an awful lot of really bad software being written today. But there is also some pretty good stuff - far more than there was back in the days when software writing was a specialist discipline. There are just as many (and probably more) good photographers today than there were 25, 50, or 75 years ago, too. It's just that there are also many more mediocre photographers around now that photography has become a mass market activity. A good photographer will produce good images, no matter what tool he (or she) elects to use. Just because the 'non-photographers' pick a digital camera to take their non-photographs does not mean that using a digital camera automatically relegates your images to the scrapheap. Nor, for that matter, does using film somehow make you more of a real photographer than using digital. It's not the equipment - it's the eye behind the viewfinder, and the mind behind the eye, that count.
