There is a strong vein of opinion which dictates that the easier it gets to do something, the worse the whole medium becomes. A number of people are of the opinion that punk rock killed music because it stopped being about the ability to play an instrument, and hundreds of awful bands formed as a result. This vein of opinion has spread into all art forms.

Consider the fairly haughty opinions of many professional writers with regard to bloggers. To listen to a professional writer talking about the Internet is to hear someone who feels that they are at a high class party which has been gatecrashed by barbarians – as though the fact that it is now easier to self-publish means that bloggers are bad writers per se.

The same band of opinion exists in photography. It was once the case that to own a camera you needed to spend a lot of money, and as a result, there were fewer photographers – and when they took a photo, they had to make sure it was good. Now you can buy a digital camera for not much money, and more people are taking more pictures.

Has this led to the death of photography as an art form? Only the deluded would think so. With the innovations that have arisen, people with talent but not much money can now let their talent find an audience. Sure, there are now more bad photographers than ever, but this does not mean there are fewer good ones.