Traditional Photographers Should Be Horrified By The Cover Of Today's New York Times

New York Times/Screenshot

Sports photographer Nick Laham recently shot some beautiful portraits of the New York Yankees baseball team.

The photos came out great, but what's surprising is that Laham took the photos with his iPhone, and "edited" them solely through Instagram.

Laham didn't need to use any fancy editing software like Photoshop to enhance the images. Instead, Instagram worked just fine.

Today, The New York Times featured Laham's photo of baseball player Alex Rodriguez front and center on the cover. Getty has even licensed Laham's Instagram photos on its site, suggesting that both the iPhone and Instagram are entirely suitable tools for photographers.

This is a problem for traditional photography. It used to be that you needed darkroom skills to make your photos look great. Then when things switched to digital, you at least needed to be able to make your way around Photoshop.

Now Instagram handles it all, and it looks great for editorial purposes. There's still going to be a challenge getting the great shots, and an iPhone can't handle a lot of circumstances. But the skills needed to make beautiful shots that are worthy of the cover of a newspaper continue to diminish rapidly.