One of things that fascinate me most about photography is that it is a medium so familiar to everyone. Much how most everyone doodles in the margins of pages when they're on the phone, but then swear they cannot or do not draw, almost everyone takes or has taken photos at some point in their life, but so few people would claim to be photographers, either for fun or for profit. This has always been one of the hurdles photography has had to clear in being considered a fine art - the fact that anyone can take a photo or use a camera (although my experience in camera retail might suggest otherwise). Particularly now in the age of automatic metering and focusing, taking a minimally well-exposed photo is quite easy - it is what to photograph and how that still seems to separate what we consider art and what we consider document.
What got me thinking on this tangent again is two recent instances where I was asked about particular photographic techniques in quite different fields. In one case, a customer asked if I knew anything about pinhole lenses for model railroad photography. In another instance, Erin was wondering what constituted clinical photography, and a Google search yielded one of Dine Corporation's many products for dental photography. In neither case is the resulting photograph an end unto itself, but rather a document of a particular hobby (model railroading) or process (dentistry). And yet, I think I would find the photograph, and the means by which it was made, to be vastly more interesting than model trains or someone's mouth.
Anyway, what all this rambling is about is that most of us, in one way or another, use a camera on a regualr basis, whether for family or vacation snapshots, documenting a process or interest, or simply to create a photograph. What I want to know from you, dear reader, is the ways you use cameras that I might not know about. Do you use a camera for work? Does your hobby often require some specialized piece of photographic equipment? Let me know!
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