With cameras as sleek as catwalk models, as powerful as computers – in fact, it pretty much is a quasi-computer composition – and as ubiquitous as the people that carry them around with them, the art of photography, or perhaps better phrased as the ability to capture a still image, has never been so prevalent.

Although trite, the now hackneyed prefix for "everything" is applicable here: we are all photographers now.

We all are journalists now.

We are all film-makers now.

And so on and so on.

Along with the mass proliferation of shooting devices available – at very affordable prices (and in some ways a default "free" aspect of the equally omnipresent mobile phone – the number of pictures filling up stacks and stacks of traditional photobooks, on social networking sites like Facebook and on online de facto photobooks like Flickr, as well as on computers and external hard drives, is unprecedented.

That mass of images is, quite frankly astonishing, akin to the mathematic constant pi, which never ends nor repeats, just goes on and on and on...

From a grass root level, so to speak, its liberating for people to be able to have access to such technology, to be able to record their lives in a very detailed way, and so too for democracy, the ability to record history and publish it as easy as, well, pie.

We are all "citizen journalists".

But equally, from a professional and critical vantage, the profusion of images is similar to a cacophony of sound disturbing a classical performance: harsh, unwelcome and simply too much. The argument goes that when there is so much out there, how can a truly great photograph emerge? It's like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack – impossible.

Or, to be less cynical, a long and protracted affair, which is to say, after a while the needle will be found. A good image, one "which helps people see" (hat tip to the famous Berenice Abbott for her verbal eloquence) will find its voice.

Furthermore, perhaps we can take heed from the legendary French photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson, who once said: "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

It's an idea that seems very prescient. The writer and cultural thinker Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers posited the idea of the 10,000 hour rule, which basically suggested that amount of time invested in anything would result in a quality of work that was preeminent.

Thus, taking that idea on board, we can conclude that a lot of the so-called trivial, banal and vacuous images floating about the physical and virtual world, will be, 10,000 images later, the kind that holds our collective and captive gaze.

After all, we're all photographers now, we wouldn’t expect anything less.