Photo Gallery: The Art Of Being Artsy

The original title of this post was “A Bunch Of Shitty Black And White Photos”, but at the suggestion of a devoted friend and reader (Monsieur Indie), I have changed it as to not create a bias during your initial viewing of the preceding photos.

Some of you may already know where this is going.

With the proliferation of one-touch photo editors and the relative affordability of prosumer hardware, everyone is now a photographer.

The idea that the more expensive cameras take better looking photos (which can be the case, but in this case is not) has landed DSLRs costing thousands of dollars in the hands of people incapable of explaining exposure (or the meaning of DSLR).

Spoiler alert: if you own a DSLR (that’s one of those bulky “fancy cameras” in case you’re unsure whether or not you qualify), shoot only on automatic, and “still have to learn how to use the other modes”, then you’re a part of the problem.

The photo galleries of the world (aka the internet) have become so polluted with “artsy” photos of food and shoes that the lines defining what constitutes a good or bad photo have been all but erased. Applying a black and white filter to an image does not mean you’ve captured and created something worth sharing with your 785 “friends”.

Buying a DSLR without understanding how it works is like buying a $2,000 laptop and then just using it for browsing the internet, storing those shitty photos of shoes and food, using Office, and watching porn (although how this is different from “browsing the internet”, I am not certain of).

And what kind of crazy person would do that?

So in honor of all the aspiring photographers out there, I went through the photos that 18-year-old me took in Europe with a cheap point-and-shoot camera and applied a black and white filter to them all – instant art.

The following are the original, unedited photos, all of which I consider to be of objectively poor quality.