You want anyone to pay attention? The last thing you should ever do is associate it with anything that sounds like or is the “better” version of the System. That is a bad marketing position to be in. But of someone wanting to create something better knew how to market, then they probably wouldn’t be in this industry or would have came up with it first. 😉

But the problem is, that “better” content is already out there with a different name. Zack Arias did creativeLIVE lending his expertise in studio creation (and I’m assuming he believed that WAS his “better” content) and countless others have created systems, marketing strategies, written books, made and sold videos , written blog posts, sent newsletters and more for this industry. (Also, having a commercial photographer get into the wedding and commercial space for marketing a how-to-do weddings is probably not the best idea).

So the best thing to really do is put on your big boy pants and do something great instead of complaining about the things you think are not so great. Go out and make great content. “Never make content because you don’t like someone, but only do it out of love and compassion for others.” -Tim Sanders 🙂

-Zach

Thanks for the comment DJ. You are correct. No need to really “go to the mattresses.” I just couldn’t help “the Godfather” analogy. 🙂

I do agree that there is a happy medium, and as I wrote Friday (which you confirmed here) this is not meant to be an end-all, be all.

It will be curious to see what comes of it. My guess is, everything will die down, people will forget, and the interwebs will be quite for a few weeks until the next big drama. 🙂

The only thing I’d add is to build a community. The System was created and is distributed by a strong community of Showiteers who are already executing in kindness, compassion, and professionalism so again instead of fighting against this. Join it. Together we can create the a wonderful System to offer the new photographers entering the market. We don’t need to recreate the wheel. As I said very clearly. The System isn’t everything someone needs to run their business. It’s simply a place to start. A foundation. It’s not perfect… but I don’t think it does anybody any good to encourage people to fight against it. Why not work together in unity and having something to build on instead of tear down.

All the best!
dj

Another excellent comment Steve. I didn’t know it was the difficult finding work as a second shooter. What about finding work as a third shooter (or second shooter when the client only hired one) and having the photos from that person be non-crucial?

I also think your comment about everybody at some point “spraying and praying” (or the equivalent) to be insightful. I would love to see that duel. 🙂

Thanks again.

I have more thing to throw out there, then I’m getting on with my work…

It’s not easy to find second-shooter or assisting positions. There’s this somewhat flippant belief pervading this debate that anybody who wants to learn the ropes can simply tag along on jobs with pros who are truly good enough to teach them something.

But it’s not like that!

We are quite often asked by enthusiastic amateurs if they can join us on shoots. We almost always say no because we don’t take second-shooters unless we need to, and we can’t risk mediocre results. So we only ever take people we know are competent and who could probably do a decent job themselves – i.e. people who don’t really need much training. And I think we’re fairly representative of most professionals in social photography.

Which leaves amateurs hoping to turn professional with fewer options than this debate assumes: either they pay for training (most likely with those “accursed charlatans on the workshop wagon”!) or they shoot some free weddings/portraits and use the results to begin a business, or both. And that, I’ll bet, is how the majority of us actually got started. Very, very few of us were lucky enough to land a quality apprenticeship of any kind.

In other words, we followed something quite similar to the System, but before it was branded and monetized by David Jay. Seriously, any wedding photographer who claims never to have done something akin to “spraying and praying” in their professional careers (let’s call it “taking-more-shots-than-you-normally-would-because-you’re-not-totally-confident-in-the-results”? – it’s less inflammatory), well, they lie. And I challenge them to a duel: pistols at dawn on the high plain.