I've loved taking pictures since I bought my first camera after high school. I spent over 50 years doing photographs for others now I'm spending my time doing it for me. And what a beautiful location to do it every day. 

The advent of Digital Photography a few years ago has been an exciting change that has awakened an interest in everything photographic in a way we haven’t seen in 100 years. 

And now everyone carries a camera built right into the smartphone that we cannot do without.

Food photography, documentation, treasured snapshots of our children from their first breath to their college graduation—all of this with cameras that use sophisticated algorithms to get photos which the average consumer could not dream of a few years ago. The next step in this is the DSLR which has given every person the sophistication to shoot beautiful photos without ever understanding what it takes to make that image beautiful.

The problem is no one has learned to be a photographer. This age of point-and-shoot, to a great extent, has removed the need to know how to compose and to expose a good picture. Don’t worry about it—the camera will take care of it. And better yet, a person can shoot numerous frames and never worry about any post-production costs. And if you cannot get it right with the camera, then there is always the photo app that will fix it.

What the camera manufacturers have done is put highly sophisticated equipment into the hands of every person, without teaching them why they are taking a completely competent, colorful photo. Or helping them appreciate that lighting situations and environmental conditions and personalities of subjects cannot all be addressed by those algorithms.

The point that only photographers understand manual is not intended as a sarcasm but rather as a prod to make people think for a moment about what can be done with a camera once we go beyond the colorful little letters and icons on that control dial.