Today’s portrait photography is not the same as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Magazine covers are plastered with pictures of women who look only slightly like they would in real life, and photoshop is capable of removing wrinkles and lines, enhancing bust and reducing dress size.

What would take 8 weeks to accomplish with a wrinkle cream can all be erased in a few moments with the burn or smudge tool inside a photo post production suite.

The questions that arises is, are we better off? Has all this new technology made us better photographers? Or are we now more software users with cameras?

My wife who is a professional photographer believes that all of this post production software has allowed photographers to get lazy. They no longer have to know exactly how to expose a photo properly, since they can adjust the exposure afterwards. They don’t need to be able to perfectly frame the image since they can quickly crop that image into perfect thirds.

I feel that this is only going to become even more of a debate as technology progresses and we move further and further away from film photography and photographers having to think about the images they’re shooting to ensure that what they capture is what they see.