The More Foolish

I was reading some things on Pixiq, when I saw this Twitter post from contributor Sean McCormack.

Which is worse.. The photographer that doesn't understand light, or the person that employs them?

As someone who owns a camera myself, I'm going to say the photographer. And this seems fairly obvious to me. Consider the following analogy:

Which is worse... The newspaper reporter who gets the facts of a story wrong, or the reader who repeats them?

Generally speaking, we'd consider it pretty mean-spirited to blame the reader. After all, if you're expected to know if any given fact in the newspaper is true or untrue, then you likely really don't need to be reading the newspaper in the first place.

By the same token, it seems unfair to expect that any person who hires a photographer be able to make an intelligent determination as to the photographer's overall competence. Yes, I presume there are times when even professional photographers have to hire other photographers (I suspect it's considered somewhat ill-mannered, not to mention very difficult, to photograph one's own wedding), but most of the time, if the people hiring photographers knew that much about photography, they'd shoot their own pictures.

But I get the reference - Ben Kenobi's jab at Han Solo from Star Wars. But even there, it seems like a fairly obvious question. It's just that at the time, is was a new question in the public consciousness. Now that the novelty has worn off, it doesn't seem clever anymore.