Over the last seven years I have posted a grand total of four YouTube photography tutorials – all on the rather niche topic of transmitting images live from Canon cameras. I think that they were helpful and I know that they are accurate. One day I might post some more and in planning that the other day I spent some time looking at what other people are posting. I disappeared down the YouTube photography rabbit hole for far too long!

There’s some great stuff there. I learned a couple of useful things and left comments to let the folks that had posted know that. There’s also a huge quantity of utter guff! For those who speak English but who haven’t come across the term guff it means a combination of rubbish, nonsense and just plain wrong.

Whenever I give a talk to people interested in photography I tend to have a slide that says:

If someone tells you that there’s only one way to do something in photography, don’t listen to them, they’re a fool.

There are a lot of fools on YouTube. They range from people telling you how great they are to those who confuse heavily photoshopped imagery with photography and all the way to people who really can’t divorce opinion from fact – yet they all seem to get hundreds and even thousands of visitors and subscribers. It’s disheartening to think that so much time and energy goes into producing material that is so bad but I guess that’s the world that we now live in.

So my word of warning is that if you spend time down this particular rabbit hole take time and care not to be taken in by the guff.