Frequently, when I’m out painting a landscape, someone will come up next to me and look at the scene I’m painting. Then, they take out their phone, snap a photograph of the scene, and walk away. They don’t say anything to me, but they make themselves quite conspicuous. In other words, they position themselves well within my field of view (otherwise, I wouldn’t see them; I’m not looking around behind me when I’m painting). Indeed, they cause enough of a distraction that I usually have to wait until they have left to continue with my painting.
From my perspective, it is difficult not to interpret this as a kind of statement. I always imagine that the person is thinking, “Oh, how quaint. I guess she hasn’t heard of cameras. Ha ha, look how clever I am! While this loser spends hours painting this scene, I can take a superior image of it with my trusty phone!”
Now, it’s also possible that the person is thinking, “Hmmm. An artist is painting this scene. There must be something to it. Let me take a photograph.” This is probably a more likely interpretation. But even if this is the case, the person is making the standard mistake of thinking that their photograph is the equivalent of my painting, or attempting to preserve the experience of looking at the scene by taking a photograph of it. I’ve previously written in detail about why these are fallacies.
You can say that I’m thinking too much about this and taking things way too personally, but please note that I am a professional artist. This is my work. I sell my drawings and paintings. When someone walks into my field of view and makes a point of taking a photograph of the scene I am or painting, they are communicating to me that they don’t think my work is worth paying for. They are revealing that they think they can get the equivalent of my work product by taking a quick photo with their phone.
The people who do this are highly unlikely to be reading this blog, but I thought I would put out into the world a demonstration of why what I do is not something that can be captured with a photograph. Anyone is free to take a photograph of the scene I am drawing or painting, but their photograph will have nothing to do with what I am doing.
In my last entry, I posted the following sketch of the view through one of the large windows of the hotel I stayed at during a recent visit to Amsterdam. Please take a good look at it before you scroll down any further. What does it make you think of? What is the image that forms in your mind? Is it a pleasant scene?

The sketch, as small as it is (the size of the sketchbook it’s in is 14 x 20.3 cm), took me two days to complete. Afterwards, I took the following photograph with my camera. It shows more-or-less what I was looking at while I sketched. (You can see the yellow light from the chandelier in the lobby reflected in the glass.)

Let me rotate and crop the photo to focus on the area I chose for my sketch.

I don’t know about you, but this is not, in my opinion, a scene worth photographing. In the photo, the buildings look worn and grey. In the sketch, I removed details I considered irrelevant, such as the trees, the cars, and the cable. I focused on what mattered, and I believe I captured something of the architecture and atmosphere of Amsterdam, a sense of what makes it such a pleasant place to visit.
I saw something in this scene that made me want to sketch it. My sketch captures what I saw. The photograph does not. I think I get to have the last laugh.