Being a Pro Photographer Isn't What It Used To Be

[photoguy99]

The ubiquity of digital cameras -- not even including phones -- is way way way beyond anything from the film days.

Sales of DSLRs peaked at something like 10x the record sales of SLRs.

Film cameras were common enough that in any group of middle class white people, there was usually at least one person who had one. Digital cameras were common enough that most people in any group of middle class white people had one. Phones, of course, push that up to every member of every group in any first world nation and most second world nations.

 

[runnah]

The ubiquity of digital cameras -- not even including phones -- is way way way beyond anything from the film days.

Sales of DSLRs peaked at something like 10x the record sales of SLRs.

Film cameras were common enough that in any group of middle class white people, there was usually at least one person who had one. Digital cameras were common enough that most people in any group of middle class white people had one. Phones, of course, push that up to every member of every group in any first world nation and most second world nations.

Did you factor in all sorts of film cameras or jus SLRs. Because everyone had some sort of film camera.

 

[bribrius]

The problem here isn't digital cameras and photographers it's the places that employ them.

The newspaper/magazine industry is/was the bread and butter for most working pros. Like other giant industries that thought they were too big to fail they didn't move quickly enough with the times and now are very much behind or out of business. Ask any under 30 person when was the last time they bought a magazine or newspaper and I garuntee most have never bought one or it has been years since they did.

Blaming digital cameras for the demise of the paying photo jobs is asinine.

The clear majority of newspaper revenues come from advertising not sales. The sales revenues barely covered delivery costs. Sales was one of the methods to quantify circulation for advertising purposes.

This is a tough call ... I blame digital photography for lowering the standards of professional photography and maybe even photography in general.

Craigslist is the single torpedo which has cause the USS Los Angeles Times to take on serious water.

Prior to digital photography, in the genre of news/photojournalism, if you didn't have a darkroom or access to a darkroom, you didn't shoot news. There were very few darkrooms in the general population and most cameras were point & shoot. Back in the film only days an interchangeable lens camera was a unique luxury for the general population. Today, nearly every household in the first world has a digital camera (cell phone counts) and a access to a computer. Custom photography used to be reserved only for the pro and very serious amatuer, but now it is easily and cheaply available to nearly all.

By shear dilution, digital photography has affected the money making potential that was the darkroom.

Rubbish. You forget that everyone had a film camera and everyone was taking terrible photos before digital cameras. If anything digital has allowed those with more talent than money to show off their skills.

As for the news and the pure documentation aspect of it things are much better. Before you were limited to seeing only what the editors allowed you to see. Now anyone with a camera phone who happens to be a near a newsworthy event can snap a photo and get it on Twitter and into the news.

Saying the standards of what makes a good photo have been lowered is silly. The amount of skill and creativity needed to take a good photo hasn't changed.

you are making some good points here!

 

[Gary A.]

The ubiquity of digital cameras -- not even including phones -- is way way way beyond anything from the film days.

Sales of DSLRs peaked at something like 10x the record sales of SLRs.

Film cameras were common enough that in any group of middle class white people, there was usually at least one person who had one. Digital cameras were common enough that most people in any group of middle class white people had one. Phones, of course, push that up to every member of every group in any first world nation and most second world nations.

Back in the '60's, in my neck of the works a 35mm, while not unusual, was not commonplace and was uncommon enough not to be a household item common to any group. In college (the '70's and 80's), in college taking photography was very common and I think the camera requirement and basic understanding of photography led to a upswing in 35mm, slr photography amongst the college educated with a trickle effect amongst non-college citizens.

I see a lot more digital cameras in the great outdoors than slr's during the film-only days. At youth sporting events today, two to three parents have dSLR's with longish lens per team. With my kids events in the '90's, I was unique in shooting youth sporting events with an ILC.

 

[pixmedic]

out of my realm of expertise. i will just chock it up to what i always think about these things. Digital killed photography.

people said the same thing when roll film replaced wet plates.
when electronic metering came out.
when cartridge film came out.
when autowinders came out.
when autofocus came out.
The technology that "seemed" to make prior renditions obsolete did not start with digital photography, nor will it end with it.

photography, like any other industry, is constantly changing.
the good photographers adapt, and the rest b!tch about the new innovations "killing" the industry.

 

[imagemaker46]

I grew up with cameras and was working the sidelines of professional football games starting in 1970, at that time there were possibly 6 photographers shooting a game. In 1974 high school there were 3-4 people with film cameras. While quite a few people did have some sort of film camera, they were not a household item, and the families I knew with cameras would have all the birthdays, Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving pictures on the one roll in the camera. It has changed with digital, and in the past 12 years it started. Within the last 5 years the business started to go away, it became more difficult to keep good clients as some staff member owned a camera capable of producing an image they could use, it may not have been any good, but it was ok.

This is where we are at today. When I go to the same sidelines I started shooting on in 1970, there are now 20 photographers there, thing is there are still only 6 professionals shooting, the other 14 have no clients, are under equipped, and have no clue what they are doing. They managed to get passes through some bogus method(friend that works for the team usually) that will be tightened up next season.

The professionals are still working, but instead of sharing the loaf of bread that was there, we're all fighting over the crumbs now. Every now and then you manage to grab a few slices and if you're lucky, you get to keep them.

 

[fotomonkey]

Saying the standards of what makes a good photo have been lowered is silly. The amount of skill and creativity needed to take a good photo hasn't changed.

I don't know. I've certainly seen people's appreciation for questionable work. I don't think a lot of people care about quality.

 

[dennybeall]

It's not what makes a good photo that has changed, it's what people are willing to accept that has changed.
It actually could be that people have always been willing to accept less of a quality picture all along. We, as photographers just gave them more than they needed.

 

[Gary A.]

It's not what makes a good photo that has changed, it's what people are willing to accept that has changed.
It actually could be that people have always been willing to accept less of a quality picture all along. We, as photographers just gave them more than they needed.

I don't think the average viewer (people) have anything to do with it. I think economics of cheap/greed over quality/less profit combined with the elimination of the darkroom, speaks more to the present state of affairs than anything else.

 

[runnah]

I can't wait until my generation starts to wistfully look back upon the days of VHS and cassettes!

 

[tirediron]

out of my realm of expertise. i will just chock it up to what i always think about these things. Digital killed photography.

This is exactly what the glass-plate set were yelling when George E. came along with that new-fangled roll-film stuff!

 

[Derrel]

I am amazed that not one person has mentioned specifically the hugely increased number of outlets that use photos. Back when imagemaker46 began shooting football, in this town there were TWO outlets for pro football images; then those two daily papers merged, and then there was ONE, single outlet that ran pro football pictures, the daily newspaper, The Oregonian, a paper that began in the 1850's.

Today, there are many,many web-based outlets. Images from a single game now can be used on literally HUNDREDS of web sites catering to sports photos and writing about events. I've read tons of talk about declining quality of images, but not much about how the huge increase in outlets means the photos of sports events are diluted in quality.

Interestingly, in last night's Oregon at Oregon State "Civil War" football game, the BEST shot so far of Oregon QB Marcus Mariota hurdling the OSU defender was shot by Brian Davies, of the Eugene-based paper, The Register Guard, perhaps the single best photojournalism newspaper left in the USA in terms of photographs driving the layouts, and photo quality and number. See the photo here,and note where I am linking to this image!!!: Mobile Uploads - University of Oregon Alumni Association | Facebook

Other sites have the same leap, but from different camera positions. The Oregonian's Bruce Ely, a good sports shooter, ran a complete motor-driven sequence of it on the Oregon Live web site this morning, but it's nowhere near as good.Marcus Mariota in the 2014 Civil War | OregonLive.com

Sports Illustrated ran with the SAME leap, but different timing, shot by another good shooter, Steve Dykes/Getty Images here: Oregon Ducks dominate in Civil War win over Oregon State Beavers - College Football - SI.com

There are plenty of blogs and news site that run stills today, which never existed even 15 years ago. EVERY single TV station in the USA now runs stills, and video; the blogs and the web sites of little, and gigantic corporate sites, now have the ability to upload 10,15,20 photos from news and sporting events, where in the past, they would run two, or three images tops, except on the very biggest stories of the year. Nowadays, the sheer number of published images is up one-hundred fold over what it used to be, back in the good ole days when a network of good ole boys were the only ones allowed to shoot sporting events.

 

[dennybeall]

Good point Derrel, there are more and more photos being used. Unfortunately a large number, if not the majority, of those photos are either free to the publisher or very cheap.
We have to be a strategist as well as a photographer these days just to get the photo without Susy or Phred jumping in the way waving their square foot of iPad in the air to take a photo.
Three photographers were up on a staircase taking photos and video of a large bird fishing in the surf yesterday and this lady just casually walks across the sand and almost up to the bird to take it's picture with her cellphone. Needless to say the bird took off and she just walked away.

 

[imagemaker46]

Quality for the most part in regards to everything being produced has changed. The cheaper a product the more profit generated for the seller. TV's that cost $10k a few years ago are selling for $500.00 or less, the quality may still be there but they don't last as long. Cheaper manufacturing practices are used, everything is imported from China, and the work is garbage. IKEA produces cheap products that fill a market but don't last. Photographers have to charge less to get the work, but in the process, have to work much harder to generate the same kind of income. It used to be shooting a quick job you could charge $300 for an hours work, now people are willing to do it for $50 just to get the work. Some people still appreciate the value of what they buy or who they hire, but these people are becoming more scarce. Finding a really good client and being able to hold on to them for a few years is gold these days.

 

[Derrel]

It used to be shooting a quick job you could charge $300 for an hours work, now people are willing to do it for $50 just to get the work.

This is very,very true. I used to shoot small-product commercial photographs in the early 1990's using a 4x5 view camera and a couple of lenses, Polaroid back, and a professional studio lighting system that I had about seven years' worth of experience with. There were NO digital cameras then, and most scanners were $20,000+ machines owned only by service bureaus. Computers at that time, like our $4,000 Macintosh and our $2,000 texas Instruments laser printer, were barely able to open a .GIF file. It was the time of easy money in photography--you had to KNOW, as in KNOW, how to make photos, without screwing up. The fastest turn-around on slide film would be four hours, so...the business was entirely different in those days. Photography has transitioned from a specialist's field, to one in which hundreds of millions of people world-wide are at least passably proficient. The days of easy money are long gone. The easy money began going away as sooooooooooooon as flatbed scanners and personal computers gained the ability to actually "handle" color images.

Once pictures left the province of film, and proofs, and paper-based images and moved into digitally-stored and digitally transmitted and digitally-viewed images, photography as we knew it began to evolve, rapidly, into digital imaging. The entire older model, which had evolved over about 140 years of silver-based capture and mostly paper-based photographs, RAPIDLY morphed into an all-new business model for making, selling, viewing, and distributing pictures. The old, film-based, darkroom-based, print-based system collapsed very rapidly.

ALl the buggy-whip manufacturers, and saddle and tack makers lamenting the new-fangled horseless carriage with its rubber tires and infernal combustion engines and smelly gasoline instead of sweet hay and oats will not turn back the clock. I lost what would have been a great career out of it, right at this transitional period. A lucrative, easy business died, as NEW technology was invented, and mega-corporations sold the technology to millions of people eager to take over their own picture-making and picture-creating needs. So, of course, being a pro photographer isn't what it used to be.