It's a bitch learning to be a photographer if you're not one to begin with.

A couple times I've spent an hour or more over IM or phone helping a couple of different people who were convinced "their camera was broken" when the issue was they didn't have the slightest idea how to use any of the settings or even what they meant.

Personally, I'm old school... I used a Nikon FTN (film) for years back in the early 70s when I was in junior high, developed my own film and printed my own prints (some color, but mostly b&w) At the time, I knew the differences between different film and paper manufacturers and all sorts of subtleties which I've long since forgotten... but I also did everything manually because there was no automation on the FTN at that point. I can do OK on a digital camera because I do understand manual shooting, but it's still a different world than the mostly B&W stuff I shot years ago in more controlled settings.

I agree that camera automation is the bane of quality photographs, though I also am amazed that the Canon Rebel XT can actually do pretty well on automation... in some cases.

It really isn't all that complicated to shoot manually once you understand the basic concepts of ISO, white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field. It just takes a little practice, but once you figure out what's going on, I find it pretty intuitive. Perhaps one of us who knows enough about that should do a short tutorial.

The other thing is... to be fair, a lot of webmasters have been learning as they go. We are starting to work on boyfunk 4.0 and we will have a lot of photos to go through, because in a lot of our older shoots the camera work left a lot to be desired. We've gotten better, but we still have a ways to go before we really get it consistently where we want it, and I suspect that most other site owner/producers are in the same position, unless they started as photographers first, site owners second.

But I do agree that even the worst photog should be able to self-censor his work and post only the better stuff.