Just to add a little bit to this discussion, what happened to photographers in recent years also happened in many other fields... I see tons of parallels with photography, let's see...
I have a friend who's a musician and he made a new album recently. He recorded it, mixed it, mastered it, and produced it himself. He used all the same software the music industry is using, and he learned the whole thing by himself. In his case, it was either he does all by himself, or there's no album at all. While I'm no expert in music, to my ears, the sound quality is totally at par with what is sold today from the big bands in music stores. Maybe an audio engineer would pick on little things, but let's say my friend is probably at 95% of what a professional studio would have produced.
I'm a columnist for a major newspaper, and also a magazine writer, and the same problem has been happening in this field as well. In the past, those positions where held by "professional" journalists who had an interest in a specific field. They were writing articles or columns on top of their day job as a journalist. Of course, they were paid the same salary, which turned out to be very expensive in the end. Then, came the popularity of bloggers, and self proclaimed experts, so those magazines and newspapers opened up their pages to those "non professional" writers. They could pay them much less since they were not officially employed by the media, and quite frankly, would welcome the notoriety of being published by a serious media. In the vast majority of cases though, those "non-professional" experts happened to know a lot more on their subject than journalists with a hobby. They were not the best writers though, but their articles could be reviewed and corrected by internal staff, then published. In the end, you got a much better article written by a passionate individual in the know, and costing much less. If you're the boss, what would you do?
I have a friend who owes an helicopter. He used to have a TV show where he would present some interesting regions from above. Well... His net cost to keep his 350K$ helicopter in the air for say half a day, is about the same as buying a high-end drone with 4K recording capabilities. When you consider that you can hire any 15 years old kid who got a drone for Christmas, pay him 100$ a day, and get all the aerial footage you want... Of course, my pilot friend is no longer producing his TV show...
Being a book writer is also a huge challenge today. Very few succeed, and you have to be very persistant if you want to be published, especially if it's your first book. Or, you can publish yourself if no one wants your book.
What about cinema and movies? Almost the same... Remember the Blair Witch Project movie? While only the big studios can afford to produce movies like Star Wars, The Lord of the RIng and the Hobbit Trilogy, you do have individual filmmakers that are producing interesting movies with very little means. Remember Fede Alvarez with his short "
Ataque de Panico!"? I would not want those guys to be weeded out of the movie landscape. I spend a lot of hours watching videos on Vimeo, and I'm always pleasantly surprised to see that there is so much talent out there.
As you can see, this is an entirely new world of opportunities. The more pessimistic of us may see it as the good old days are gone because the content we get to see today is no longer controlled and filtered by big corporations and medias providing excellent working conditions. Of course, if you were a highly paid worker in these corporations, and happened to take it easy in the years before you got fired, you're probably not in the right mind set to appreciate what is done today by people with a fraction of the means you use to have. Well folks, party's over...
The optimistic people though are truly excited by today's technology. If you are passionate and talented, and you know what you are doing, well, there will be no freakin corporate idiot who will tell you that your ideas suck and refuse to produce your work. You can get it done yourself, and have the freedom of proving them all wrong. Let the public be the judge... This is exactly what is getting me going nowadays. We will see talented people emerging from nowhere because they can do it, not because someone in a big corporation decided for myself that they were worth seeing...
Of course, a lot of "pros" are in for a very rough ride nowadays, as it's getting real hard to distinguish yourself from the crowd, but it happened in the past... I beleive though that we need to focus our attention couple years ahead, and see where our industry is going if we still want to make money out of photography in the future.
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