In our continuing pursuit to separate fact from fiction on what really matters to photographers, we turned to our Facebook community and basically asked photographers to commit heresy on what trends they're convinced people are just pretending to love.
We expected opinions.
But what we got was a masterclass in suppressed rage, economic anxiety, and the kind of honesty that only comes when you give creatives a safe space to vent.
Over 700 comments later, we've witnessed something between a group therapy session and a revolution. And yes, we read every single one of them (because data nerds gon’ data nerd).
The replies swung from dry humor to blunt honesty. Under the jokes, the thread kept asking for three practical things:
pictures that still look like themselves in ten years,
a workflow that pays,
and a culture that lets photographers choose a look without getting dragged.
In practice that means protecting highlight texture and believable skin, keeping stylized frames as accents rather than the backbone, pricing and scoping so redo risk is covered, and translating client references instead of copying them.
Those obvious sounding statements manifested as tensions in the comment section, explaining why the same techniques showed up as both decay and revival.
They were too compelling to not write about. So here we are, delving deeper and dissecting the sentiment behind the brutal honesty.
1. Blurry photos: mistake or method?
If there was a winner in this festival of grievances, it was the "intentionally blurry photo" trend, mentioned over 100 times with the kind of passion usually reserved for political debates.
Bruno Lazaro, without mincing words, said:
"The blur crap. Photographers posting this s**t like it's 'art'.
Yet to meet a bride that says 'can you please shoot out of focus and all wonky? And direct flash us holding a champagne glass sitting uncomfortably on some stone steps'."
“ I'm convinced that it was just glorified mistakes."
- Arielle Nonette Randle
“I just don’t like them. I can get a blurry pic on a cellphone, I’m not taking peoples money and giving a blurred pic unless they specifically ask for it.”
- Tonya Lyn Eichten
The same sharpness that pro photographers achieve over years of experimentation and practice, is, on some level, achievable today for anyone with a decent mobile camera. Perhaps, some work uses blur as a badge of sophistication, a way to create a differentiated aesthetic, because mobile phones can deliver sharp images too!
This echoes the moment when photography threatened painting. When the photograph takes a much better portrait, why commission an artist and sit still for hours at end for the same? When the camera was new and just beginning to change the world, the value for paintings shifted toward abstraction.
Today’s blur borrows that same principle. Differentiation. That's probably it.
"So many don't do it correctly, and many I've seen just feel like it's missed focus. When done properly, it's super sweet… but I don't see them done properly much."
- Lena Messana
The implication is that only a photographer with genuine artistic vision and skill can successfully create impactful work while purposefully introducing imperfections.
The bet is that chosen imperfection reads like art; the risk is execution without intent.
The working middle looks like this: Use one or two motion frames to carry the beat of a scene, then return to clarity so the album holds. There is a ledger under the poetics. One reshoot at $1,500 in a twenty-wedding year reshapes the season’s margin.
Next up: From motion, we drifted to brightness. How far “airy” can go before faces lose texture.
2. “Light and airy” or simply overexposed?
The backlash against overexposed photography sparked yet another debate between aesthetic choice and technical incompetence.
"Blown out photos, calling them 'Light & Airy” - Wayne Hall
“Overexposed/blown out photos. They hurt my eyes and my soul.” - Katrina Bulgrien
"Wedding photographers calling their style 'timeless' and 'dreamy/creamy' when really it's just massively over-exposed." - Glen Colbert
But is this linguistic rebranding about technical failures or strategic market positioning?
The "light and airy" aesthetic performs exceptionally well on social media platforms where images compete for attention in compressed, backlit phone screens. What looks blown out on a calibrated monitor might be exactly what clients expect from their Instagram-ready wedding gallery. It books.
It raises a business question: do strict exposure ideals always align with bookings? Many who love the look may simply understand their market and deliver to that brief. No?
Once exposure came up, color followed, especially the warm palettes that rule the feed.
3. Orange Skin & Desaturated Greens (The “Oompa Loompa” Edit)
The visceral hatred for orange/brown filters went beyond aesthetic preference into existential photography anxiety.
April Lorraine Corey’s shorthand needed no footnote:
"The 'Oompa Loompa'. Orange skin and weird green hues. Just stop already."
Kim Howells explained: "The latest colour phase where everything is brown-orange, and greens are muted to barely existing. It's dating a generation of portrait and wedding photos."
Jennifer VanEmburgh called it “this generation's glamour shot."
Warmth sells on mobile. That is the defense. The cost shows up later. Correcting three hundred selects after delivery can eat 20 hours once proofing and re-exports stack up. At $125 to $150 per hour, that preset becomes a week of lost billables.
Follow the slider arguments long enough and you run straight into the spreadsheet.
4. The cookie-cutter preset problem
“The blue-black preset that looks like the last few Harry Potter movies. Everything looks like Gotham City.” — Darla Sowders
“Throwing a preset on and thinking your photo is all good.”
— Autumn Elizabeth Hogan
“Cookie-cutter edits where they click a preset for all photos and call it good.”
— Kenneth Tinkham
“Using presets that turn everything brownish.”
— RM Christensen
“Presets that change the photo to a whole different color.”
— Rachal Childs
“Ads for presets that make images look overexposed or oversaturated.”
— Heather Page
All of that points to the same failure mode. Presets are fast and fixed. Real assignments shift rooms, color temperatures, cameras, and ISO.
A fixed curve moves everything together, including the mistakes. Whites drift toward beige, greens toward gray, skin toward plastic, and the print is where it shows.
If you want the vibe of a Lightroom preset to hold under changing scenes, use an adaptive route. Aftershoot’s Instant AI Profile takes your preset, asks you to fine-tune three representative images for exposure, temperature, and tint, and builds a personal profile in about a minute. It keeps your look while reacting to exposure and white balance so a gallery stays coherent when the light changes.
For long-run volume and multiple bodies, a Professional AI Profile trained on around 2,500 of your edits can keep a defined house style steady across venues and seasons.
Either way, let adaptive tools like Aftershoothandle the drift, and keep your judgment for skin, prints, and the final pass.
Unless you have your name on a ticket to Hogwarts Express, and you can apply consistent edits using the spell "Imagis Excolere" with the swish of a wand, Aftershoot may be your best bet.
5. The Photography Business Dilemma Between Trends and Timelessness
Eddie Hill delivered the thread’s most searing commentary. It explains how we got here and is worth reading in full:
Eddie's two cents read like a manifesto for professional standards in an Instagram world, but it also reveals the anxiety of established professionals watching their industry democratize.
The tension between accessibility and quality, between market forces and artistic integrity, runs through every comment in this thread.
James Franklin pointed to another pressure point:
"Buying a 'good camera' and opening a photography business with no education and no experience, and then acting surprised when clients are mad because you can't consistently produce professional images. Oh wait, nobody loves that massive trend."
That line stings because it names drift, not because it picks sides.
But before we get too comfortable on our high horses,
Brittany Sterwalt dropped a truth bomb:
“Is it weird that I do ALL of these “trends”, yet make a boat load of money? I think I’ll keep doing what I’m doing 😉"
Perhaps, her confidence comes from understanding her market and executing consistently.
Both truths share the same economy.
Clients buy feelings using language the feed taught them. Photographers either translate those references into durable work or deliver the reference and accept the timestamp.
Erin Donlon, on a ‘pay-what-you-can’ job:
“It made me happy. It made them happy. I made 500 dollars. I paid bills that week.”
Cost reality check
Trends turn expensive the moment they trigger rework. A few common failure paths and what they cost.
1. Color redo on 300 selects at about four minutes each is roughly 20 hours. If your target is $125 per hour, that is $2,500 of margin traded for a preset that looked great on a phone and collapsed on paper.
2. A reshoot that seems small at $1,500 reshapes a twenty-wedding season. You lose the fee, the referral path and a weekend you cannot sell again.
3. Direct flash and heavy warmth often add cleanup on skin. Even thirty seconds per file across 200 hero images is 100 minutes you did not price.
4. “All blur” galleries increase culling time. If a wedding day produces 3,000 frames and 10% land in the ambiguous pile, an extra single second per frame adds 30 minutes. At three seconds it adds 90 minutes. That time repeats across the year.
(Unless you use Aftershoot, then you cull in 3-5 minutes, get the blurry photos in a “Blur” category organized neatly, ready for you to pick the winners, apply batch edits and natural retouching, getting you close to 80% of the way to final gallery in the next 30 mins. 😁)
Use style as seasoning. If a choice risks rework or reshoot, anchor the gallery with a neutral master and export a styled variant for the feed.
Survival choices live in the same market as standards. Honesty about tradeoffs is the real professional line.
Philip Isom sheds light on another critical problem our industry grapples with.
“Persuading people to buy expensive mirrorless cameras and new lenses, and then they find out their pictures are no better…”
We call this GAS. Not the kind that clears out a room. It’s Gear Acquisition Syndrome. We talked about this extensively in our bi-monthly newsletter this August.
Understand your market. Find your style. And deliver consistently.
Yes, poster-on-the-wall advice, but still rings true as perhaps one of the most profound takeaways for every photographer out there.
By the way, if you’re interested, signup for the newsletter. Alongside juvenile jokes, we put a lot of effort into curating content that photographers actually like reading.
6. Safety First: When Photography Trends Become Dangerous
“Babies sitting in milk!" exclaimed Twanna Broady.
To which Diana Rodriguez replied,
“I gotta agree with you on this one. I never understood it. I’ve only had one client request it and the entire session was hot mess.
The baby cried for almost an entire hour. Mom cried too and was insisting to continue torturing the poor baby.”
Another one:
“Posing subjects on train tracks or in the middle of the road.”- Kelly Moore O'Sullivan
More than purity tests, these responses are reminders that bodies, comfort, and safety travel together.
If a flying gown in water fits the person and the place, craft it carefully. If not, chase shape, gesture, and a silhouette the subject will still like in ten years.
Complex newborn posing asks for training, spotters, composites, and more importantly, can stress the baby. Many in the thread now prefer baby-led posing and parent connection. That trade replaces novelty with longevity.
All of this lives inside a market that rewards sameness, which is why the pressure keeps rising.
7. Balancing Adaptation and Authenticity in the Instagram Era
The red queen effect is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, that says species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species. That theory holds for industries too, doesn't it?
For your business, this could mean the value of your work depends partly on how clients compare it with competing vendors, something economists call positional goods. When everyone adopts the same style to survive, individual photographers face pressure to adapt or die.
On one side, you have photographers who view their craft as art, who trained for years, who understand the technical mastery required to create genuinely good work. On the other, you have a market that increasingly doesn't care about any of that—clients who are perfectly happy with their orange-tinted, Pinterest-inspired, $75 mini-session photos.
Both realities coexist; the craft question is how to deliver work that lasts.
Ashley Fretto Studio offered what might be the most mature perspective in the entire thread:
"What I've learned from this post? You will never make everyone happy. You're not everyone's cup of tea. So do you, and live and let live. Lol.
We spend so much time trying to fit into boxes that were never meant to hold us."
That attitude pairs well with a few practices that showed up repeatedly as common ground.
Each voice deserves respect. Each one of you needs to be celebrated. This is art. And in art, there is never black and white. Gatekeeping should be the last thing standing in the way of artistic legitimacy.
Al Bright said:
"Most really good and/or passionate photographers, regardless of skill level, are out taking photographs not giving a shit about trends or opinions of other photographers about said trends let alone posting about those opinions on the internet."
Al,
We exist to make your life easier and free up your time. We count the comments so you can chase the light. If there is a thread that buys you an hour back with your camera, that’s a trend we’ll always back.
So please do take a teeny bit of your time and continue to share your opinions with us. We’d be lost without you!
Moving further down the comments rabbit hole, the thread kept circling one center: intention outlasts fashion.
Your eye wins, everything else just helps
What emerges from this digital confession booth isn't condemnation of trends themselves, but frustration with mindless execution. The photographers who defended their choices did so from positions of intentionality. They understood why they made specific creative decisions.
Perhaps the most insightful observation came from Edi Roque, who offered a nuanced take on why these trends persist:
"The way I see it most of these 'trends' started with a skilled photographer who had a concept for an image and utilized in-camera (and post production) techniques to create the feel and look of whatever they intended for.
To be honest, we all have done multiple of these things. The problem is when people jump on the train without any context or narrative to support the use of the so-called trend."
This is the crux of it. Every trend started as someone's creative breakthrough. The problem is the mindless replication, the reduction of creativity to a preset, the transformation of art into algorithm.
Tracey Torres delivered the bottom line:
"They're all overrated. Just do what makes you happy, keep practicing, learning and be the best photographer you can be! Do what's best for your own creative mind and what works best for you & you will attract your right clients.
This world is so consumed in what everyone else is doing and you wonder why so many have imposter syndrome. It's ok to learn from others but we all need to just be ourselves & stop worrying about the next new trend.
Support each other! We're all artist in our own special way."
The strongest voices in the comments did not demand one palette or one technique. They argued for intention, safety, and respect for the human being in the frame. Treat tools, trends, and techniques like brushes for a painter. They support the vision; but the vision still has to come from you.
The albums that survive a decade do so because someone made choices that served the person.
If the industry needed a north star, it was hiding in plain sight across seven hundred replies.
Build the baseline that will live on a wall. Season with style in amounts you could defend to future you.
The feed will move on. The trends will pass. The photographs with something to say will remain.
Bonus: Other pet peeves from the thread
Brittany Leann
"Direct flash. They just scream “I don’t know how to properly light an image without pointing the flash directly at the subject”. These are going to look so dated in a few years."
Mendy Colby
“Maternity gowns with the back end blowing in the nonexistent wind (hair not blowing so why is the dress). Totally looks like she let out the world's strongest fart!”
Christine Sunflower Rowan
"Families just stand in water(lake/river) Like why? It cuts off their outfits and it’s just strange. I only see it being cute and plausible when the family are splashing on the edge of the water and jumping in puddles."
Dawn Salisbury
"Adding in people that have passed away...just how do explain grandmother standing next to her granddaughter when Grandma died 15 years before she was born? Or Uncle Harry that passed away 5 years ago is now in your wedding pictures taken last week?"
Linda Horton
"Over-processing, especially with heavy warm/yellow cast. It’s so trendy (and awful) and will make wedding photos look dated very quickly. The bride’s dress is white, not brownish-yellow!"
Michael Holmes
"Real estate photos that look like the house was rendered in CAD"
Carolyn Gallo
"Families frolicking in a field with mom in a long dress and flat brimmed hat but you can’t see anyone’s face because they are too busy being “authentic”. "
David Terry
"Out of focus subject with unimportant background object in focus. Totally looks like a mistake that the photographer forgot to delete."
Posted by Manaswini Rao 
