Wedding photography is a contracted service. The photographer's job is to produce pictures with the content and in the style that the client wants. If what they want matches what you can produce, the relationship will be mutually beneficial and satisfying. If the photographer exercises an artistic freedom to produce something different from what he led the client to expect, they will be dissatiffied, disappointed, and, most likely, quite angry. And he just might not get paid. Without artistic freedom, you are delivering craft, not art. It is valuable and honorable, but it is still craft, not art.

The same is true for contracted product photography, architectural photography, real estate photography, or travel photography. The images may be perfectly executed and exquisitely beautiful, but they are craft, not art. They are in no way devalued because of the circumstances, but they are not art.

One of my favorite paintings in the Kimbell Museum is a portrait of a young girl outdoors on a chaise with her dog. It is art. Not because it is a painting, but because it was painted by the artist with permission, but to his own vision and expectations. He was not hired nor contracted to do the painting, and he was free to express his vision. Turns out that the parents did like the painting and ended up buying it. It has continued to be considered a work of art by the art community.

I miss :
- a daily newspaper --- No
- looking things up in real encyclopedia --- No
- bench seats in the car --- No
- 3 speed on the column --- No
- dad plowing moms garden in the spring --- No in my family, no garden
- the annual church picnic where the same family ran the same both each --- No
- Sunday with Sunday school in the morning and preacher service at night --- No
- my 4H picking up corn missed by the pull behind corn picker --- No
- cane fishing poles and worms --- No
- only 3 channels on our black and white tv --- No No and No
- Stan Musial --- No

What about you ?

First it was global cooling would kill us all. Next over population. Then, holes in the ozone, then global warming and acid rain. Then underpopulation. Next Climate change (covers all weather) would get us. Not to be out done, the global panic would kill us all, particularly if you didn't buy and wear their useless masks. The hand wringers have been spouting all this garbage through out my entire 78 years. Oh, I forgot, we be running out of oil sometime in the early '70's.

Everyone should know it's all a bunch of crap, and the truth is space aliens will soon swarm in and eat us all alive...