silver
Maybe it's appropriate that it's one of those sun-shining-through-the-fog days on the north coast.

I've seen a run of "the sky is falling" posts from photographers recently... camera phones will replace pros, there's no work out there, talent doesn't matter anymore, etc.

Funny, I sure see a lot of bought and paid for photos in magazines and other publications every week. Somebody is doing all that work. Hell, I don't even market my photography anymore (it's supposed to be for fun now) and I'm still approached by the occasional magazine asking to buy images, just sold one last month to a major business publication.

The folks doing all the sales probably don't mind all the sniveling. It presumably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, the whiners start to believe their own words, which means that much less effective competition. Some people are doing just fine, others never will.

Today I saw a guy applying this same negative mentality to his former engineering profession... he'd been laid off because of outsourcing to India, allegedly. Yet I've just seen the numbers, most of the larger U.S. engineering firms grew last year. Some of them grew quite a bit.

Does the economy suck? Sure. Without delving into the numbers, I suspect this administration is spinning the reports... they're spinning a lot of other things, why not this too? For example, recently we're reading inflation numbers which, if you look at the fine print, exclude energy costs. Anybody paying their own bills knows things aren't quite as rosy as Bush would have us believe. Yet most are finding ways to get by.

But then, some people made money in the great depression.