Thank you for a substantial and thought provoking post, Peng.

 

Suffice it to say, you speak of many of my concerns.

 

Here’s my take on the Photography/Poser analogy.

 

I have friends who are professional photographers. Indeed, I have just begun studying traditional Black and White Photography with one of them.

 

What Poser is, is the equivalent of a low-end digital camera in the hands of a person who doesn’t know how to use a regular camera. Everything is quick, inexpensive, immediately importable into Photoshop, and ultimately disposable.

 

As a learning tool, that’s fine. Go for it. Shoot your neighbor. Shoot your dog. Shoot your new collectable Star Wars miniature. Shoot for the moon.

 

But no one who actually knows jack hoot about photography will actually look at your work as anything but the adventures of an amateur.

 

“What, because my camera only shoots 4.2 mega-pixels? Is that the problem?"

 

No.

 

“Oh, it’s because it’s digital, and not traditional processing.”

 

Strike two.

 

“Oh, I get it...I should have invented the camera, and developed the printing process, and made friends with hoity-toity artists...."

 

Thank you for playing. Please accept this 32-megabyte memory card as a consolation prize...

 

The problem is that people do not know how to approach a scene. Instead, they grab a credit card. The lighting is off? Oh, well I’ll head over to ___ and grab a set there.

 

The figure looks wrong? Must be the morph package...Maybe the Glenda 2 figure has more forgiving joint parameters.

 

The other day at the DAZ forums, there was a thread about sketching. I was struck by how many people said that they did not sketch scenes beforehand.

 

“It’s too hard”

 

“I can’t draw”

 

“I figure messing with the machine is like sketching”

 

(I am grossly paraphrasing here)

 

Here’s a quick clue-in. A sketch doesn’t have to look “good”.

 

Ever see a building under construction? There are wooden stakes everywhere, orange traffic cones, ugly yellow scaffolds, and big green dumpsters, not to mention the ubiquitous blue porta-potties, in a veritable sea of brown mud...

 

Looks pretty nasty. That’s because it ISN’T the finished building.

 

Now what I just wrote was loaded. Tell me true, folks, couldn’t you see that scene in your mind’s eye?

 

Of course you did. That’s what a sketch is. It’s an arrangement of simple symbols to work with in order to create a scene.

 

Any man, woman or child in this forum could create that construction scene on scrap paper with a half dozen crayons..

 

But here’s the kicker...Almost no-one actually does.

 

Instead, people immediately dig through eight gigs of runtime, of seven and a half pages of Freestuff, DAZ specials, or Content Paradise to find and purchase these items.

 

And as a result, with everyone using the same materials, from the same vendors, with the same camera and light settings, the pieces become virtually interchangeable.

 

This is one of the most important points of what Peng has written here, Study this closely.