The future of photography

[Benco]

The only thing certain is uncertainty.

Maybe.

 

[runnah]

The camera is only a tiny part of the production engine of a motion picture whereas in still photography the camera can be the single most important and largest part.

So the camera was responsible for all those great photo of yours? Can I borrow it?

For every decent photo there are 1000 that are echhhh, believe me.

Oh I am sure, but there is your point evaporated. The camera does it's job just fine. It's the lighting, subject and photographer that make the photo, same as the director, script and actors make a movie.

 

[Red1SebR]

first thougt that came to mind when i read the title was this.

Artefact - Technology Product Design for the 21st Century

at least the future in the area of cameras

 

[Stevepwns]

I have absolutely no clue about the professional side of photography. My grandfather was a pro for 50 years. Until he died I never even considered the art. I am a hobbiest by nature and have been involved in different mediums of art since I was a child. I got into video editing and stumbled upon a DSLR for the 1080p quality and saw the pictures as a bonus and something to mess with. Now I am taking my camera everywhere and shooting everything I can. For the art involved. I have a clue of what I am doing and about 1 out of every 10 pictures are worth showing anyone else. I am making a point, hang on.... I was an auto mechanic for 10 years, and an electrician for 7, all the while, I taught myself how to write code in 3 computer languages, edit videos and tattoos.

Now here I am with my next hobby and loving it, but if it wasnt for the fact my Sony shows me what my picture is going to look like (for the most part) before I hit the shutter, I wouldnt have half the pictures I do. The idea of seeing the picture in your mind is easy (for me anyways) making it happen is the challenge. Taking pictures is fun and everyone can do it. that doesnt mean everyone can be a photographer.

While I was working on cars, I watched a cycle of everyone was a shade tree mechanic, I lost a lot of money. I made some of it back fixing what most people had messed up. It was around the time the "Fast and Furious" came out, when everyone had to have a fast import. The fad went away and the business came back once people realized its just not that easy.

Once the novelty wears off of the DSLR and the fun is gone, people will realize they have no clue what they are doing, they will realize that should have paid for the pro to shoot their wedding or their kids birthday, or their kids graduation. Everything goes in cycles, photography, computers, cars, tattoos, everything I have ever gained an interest in, has had a cycle like this. Another one that is big is Harleys, Ive been riding for 20+ years, in the last few, everyone has to have a harley, most of those people realize it isnt for them and sell it.

Photography is in a stage where the technology makes it easier for the average person to point, shoot and take a decent picture. BUT the time will come back when people realize they should have paid for the service. Who knows how long it will take, but it I believe it will happen.

 

[Derrel]

SNIP>>>>>Photography is in a stage where the technology makes it easier for the average person to point, shoot and take a decent picture. BUT the time will come back when people realize they should have paid for the service. Who knows how long it will take, but it I believe it will happen.

I think that is a possibility. Back when the first rollfilm Kodak camera appeared, fitted with a 100-shot long roll of film, Kodak's original slogan was, "You press the button. We do the rest." The user shot the photos, then sent the entire camera off to Kodak; the film was developed, the images printed, and a new roll was loaded, and the camera and prints and negs were all shipped back to the owner. All that for the cost of $10 (adjusted for inflation??? Maybe $299 or even a bit MORE, actually.) I think at some level, the early rollfilm Kodaks, and the other, short-roll ( say eight 6x9 cm negs per roll) folding cameras, might have impacted the professional market, at least somewhat. That was the first real "mass photography" movement.

The way I see it, photography as a profession might be headed toward the luxury service end of things. Like Stevepwns wrote, I think the time will come when people once again realize the value of paying for highly-skilled shooters to create images for them. From what I gather, the advent of hige stock libraries is now having the effect of creating more demand for exclusive, or commissioned images which are NOT going to be sold into a stock bank, free for anybody to use.

"Exclusivity" still has some value.

 

[Steve5D]

The last few years photography has become available to almost everyone with a few bucks.

When was this ever not the case?

The thing that has become cheaper over time is the duplication and distribution/dissemination of photographic images. There was a time when film was $3.99 per roll (IOW, priced at the cost of 4.48 gallons of gasoline @ $.89/gallon ), and decent-quality color print film developing was $10.99 per roll of 36 exposures printed (12.3 gallons of gasoline at $.89/gallon). At those prices, photographic film and print processing. In other words, buying a roll of 36 exposure color print film and having it developed at a decent lab, in the early 1990's, would set a regular person back as much as it would have cost them to buy one normal-sized tank full of gasoline; today, at $3.89 per gallon, that equates to $65. Photography used to carry with is very significant, REAL costs; film, devloping, proofing,printing, and enlarging used to represent very significant, ongoing costs for image-makers. Today, that is not the case. Today, the costs are hugely lower; a $2,495 Fuji S2 Pro d-slr gave me $75,000 worth of "e-6 film and processing" in only two years' worth of use, a decade ago--and that was with ZERO costs for fuel and time and lab trips...with a low-cost $650 d-slr, the cost-per-image creation cost is even more dramatically skewed.

So, in the early 1990's, shooting color prints was expensive. When the 1990's prices are adjusted to keep pace with the price of gasoline today, we can see that a 36-print cost was the equivalent of about $65, in today's money, using a necessity like gasoline as a way to track the relative cost of a luxury, like photographs.

Images used to be share-able only via prints (or slide shows). PRINTS were the normal way to view and share images; today, on-screen display is the norm. Digital capture has eliminated film costs, developing costs, printing costs, and enlarging costs, as well as costs for additional reprints to share with others who are not in the immediate, physical presence of an image.

The photography-for-pay industry really began to crumble seriously once SCANNERS became common; flatbed scanners that could take a traditional, printed image, and scan and digitize it, are what opened the floodgates that washed away the Old Model of shooting/proofing/selling prints and enlargements. Once computer imaging (meaning, the ,JPG image format and the personal computer evolution) developed and became more widespread, it was only about eight years or so before "film and prints" lost out to digitally-made, digitally-viewed, and digitally-distributed imaging as the New Model.

The real issue today is that people are trying to use older approaches that used to work, in a new era; an era where an image can EASILY (meaning in seconds, and with minimal skill required) be copied, and then distributed, for almost no monetary costs. The entire use model, cost model, pricing model, and delivery model--all those things are now...different. so, it's pretty difficult to predict how things are going to go, exdept if one just says, "The future will be different than the past was."

Well, see, here's the thing:

This is the statement that was in the OP: The last few years photography has become available to almost everyone with a few bucks.

When I was 14 years old, I had a Canon TLb and a basement darkroom.

I had a paper route that didn't exactly have me rollin' in dough, but photography was absolutely available to me. I even made a few bucks with it.

My point is that photography has always been available to the masses...

 

[Gavjenks]

A few wrenches and some brazing tools might cost you only a few hundred dollars. But not everyone does their own plumbing.
A pair of scissors and a tarp cost like $20, but not everybody cuts their own hair.

Tools and reproduction of images becoming more widely available does of course have an impact on photography, but skill in any field will always have a value up until the point where robots can do it. And there is no conceivable robotic camera system that will compose and light your photos for you anytime in our lifetimes.

I think the only reasons why photography skill is not valued by the average consumer as much as plumbing skill, is because:
1) You don't NEED photography to get by. Whereas you do need plumbing for your house to be up to code. Photography is a luxury good, and needs to therefore be aggressively and cleverly marketed to make people realize how much they never knew they wanted it. You can't just assume a constant demand as a photographer, which I think a lot of failing attempted business models do. You have to MAKE your own demand.
2) Somewhat related to it being a luxury service, a lot of people simply don't have much exposure to what high quality photography really looks like, because it's not something they HAVE to have had exposure to to have lived their lives. This is solved in part by actually having mad skills that allow you to take photographs that truly are better. But also again in part by aggressive and clever marketing. Find a way to show your community a product that highlights how much better your photography is than their iphone shots (assuming it is), and make them pay attention to it, and you can prove the value of what you charge. You can't just assume that people know the difference like you do by default.

Bottom line: If you want to make a living off of it, you need to:
1) Actually be skilled enough for your photographs to be vastly better than iphone photographs. (many photographers fail on this point, not knowing the light or composition or not being artistic)
2) Know how to run a luxury goods business, which means most of all marketing Marketing MARKETING. (more photographers probably fail on this point)(

Hit both of those points well, and you should be fine indefinitely.




Perfect little example of what I think is a bad business move that I see pretty often: advertising TFP shoots on facebook to all of your friends in order to build your portfolio. That is the group of people who would be your best core clientele in the future, and you're majorly poisoning the well by conveying the image of yourself as somebody who will work for free. If you turn around later and ask for money, there's going to be a tendency of "Schwaaa? What a sleaze. He used to do it for free..." This undermines both the image of your photography as a high end luxury good, and it undermines your own perceived confidence in actually being more skilled than iphone photographers. Both the opposite of how I think you need to be marketing your photography. Contacting good friends privately or using something like modelmayhem might be a better option. Your TFP shoots are then under the table, away from the public eye. Then when you're ready to come out as a business, you can hit the ground running and establish a much better precedent by charging immediately, and having the portfolio ready to back it up. And your main clientele has no idea that you didn't charge the people in that portfolio the same thing you're charging THEM.

 

[The_Traveler]

So the camera was responsible for all those great photo of yours? Can I borrow it?

For every decent photo there are 1000 that are echhhh, believe me.

Oh I am sure, but there is your point evaporated. The camera does it's job just fine. It's the lighting, subject and photographer that make the photo, same as the director, script and actors make a movie.

That wasn't my point.
To make a movie you need an enormous industry around you and the camera and the photographer.
So access to a movie camera does not a movie make.

To make a still image, one needs a camera, to be able to press a button, and a trivial amount of other stuff.
And modern technology has made cameras smarter and the other stuff more generally accessible.

 

[Ilovemycam]

OP...you summed it all up in your post. I never worked in the photo biz. Doing so would ruin it for me. And now more than ever. It was very hard to break in back in the 70's. You could offer to work for free as a helper to some decent names in L.A. and get in line behind the 8 or 10 others ahead of you wanting to work for free or $3/hr.

There are great talents and the lucky few that do make it big. But, I'd say becoming a famous, world renown photog is harder than becoming a famous actor or actress. (more or less)

 

[Derrel]

SNIP>>>My point is that photography has always been available to the masses...

Sorry, but NO, it was most definitely not available to the masses. For approximately the first nine decades of its life, photography was NOT a mass cultural quantity. In the 1840's,1850's,1860's, 1870's,1880's,and 1890's, the huge preponderance of people world wide owned no camerfa, and had zero access to any camera.

It was not really until rollfilm was developed that the average person, "with a few bucks" even considered buying a camera. So, from the mid-1840's until approx 1890, cameras were for "nut jobs" and "hired photography experts".

I suppose it's easy to actually ignore the history of photography, and make unfounded, ignorant statements. The fact is, until rollfilm was developed, photography was an art and a craft, practiced almost exclusively by professionals, and a HANDFUL of people who were avid hobbyists--and many of them were financially quite well-off.

The fact of the matter is that, until the 1920's, many people had a literal handful of exposures of themselves. Perhaps ONE picture of their children, one of their spouse, possibly a single portrait of their elderly parents. The fact is that until recent times, many families would expose ONE, single roll of film--per year. I used to work in a busy camera store in the 1990-era: we would sometimes see TWO Christmases on one 36-shot roll of film. Last month, the mega-report on Internet trends noted that the average cellphone user accesses his or her camera EIGHT times per day. There are new infants born this month that already have had hundreds, even thousands more photographic images made of them than, say Kaiser Wilhelm II, or Theodore Roosevelt.

Here's a good example: EVERY known photograph of Pres. Abraham Lincoln:


A good book is Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography. I've actually studied the history of photography. It was NEVER a popular, mass activity until well,well into the 20th century.

 

[webestang64]

Remember when APS was the future of photography.....LOL

 

[amolitor]

There were plenty of people doing it from the start, but it was a rich, or at any rate well to do, man's hobby for a long time. For starters, prior to the early 20th century, it ran through silver nitrate at a pretty brisk pace, to say nothing of the other chemistry.

The capability has moved down the socio-economic scale pretty steadily but only recently has it hit, basically, the bottom of the scale (in the first world, at any rate, in the third world pretty poor people have cell phones, but not *everyone* yet).

 

[table1349]

Frankly, I don't think the "change" is going to be all that much. Technology will change as it always has. I don't however agree with the OP's original premiss that photography is more available.
My non-technological grandmother used this for many many many years: Brownie #2.

As did thousands of others. With the development of film, photography became available to the masses. Before film it was a different story.

 

[Steve5D]

I suppose it's easy to actually ignore the history of photography, and make unfounded, ignorant statements.The fact is, until rollfilm was developed, photography was an art and a craft, practiced almost exclusively by professionals, and a HANDFUL of people who were avid hobbyists--and many of them were financially quite well-off.

And many of them, I'm sure, were not.

The OP's intent was pretty clear, that being that the advent of digital cameras and high quality cell phone cameras have made photography available to the masses. Sorry, but that's just not an informed position to take.

I suppose we could argue the history of just about anything, but that would be, well, ignorant, don't you think? Again, the OP's intent was pretty clear, and I addressed it from that perspective.

I do believe you're the only one here who didn't catch that...

 

[Gavjenks]

I suppose it's easy to actually ignore the history of photography, and make unfounded, ignorant statements.The fact is, until rollfilm was developed, photography was an art and a craft, practiced almost exclusively by professionals, and a HANDFUL of people who were avid hobbyists--and many of them were financially quite well-off.

And many of them, I'm sure, were not.

The OP's intent was pretty clear, that being that the advent of digital cameras and high quality cell phone cameras have made photography available to the masses. Sorry, but that's just not an informed position to take.

I suppose we could argue the history of just about anything, but that would be, well, ignorant, don't you think? Again, the OP's intent was pretty clear, and I addressed it from that perspective.

I do believe you're the only one here who didn't catch that...

Oh yes? You are "sure" that there were "many" amateur, POOR photographers in the 1860s who carried the required:
* box full of developing chemicals in breakable glass containers which would have to be padded in straw, etc. and which contain significant amounts of precious metals
* portable darkroom equipment like plates and trays and baffles and measuring devices and glassware and a lightproof area (since the technology didn't exist yet to be able to develop photos somewhere other than immediately where you took them)
* camera equipment itself (big old view camera and tripod)
* a tent for it all to go in
* tables and chairs to prepare the chemicals and such in
* most likely an assistant to help them schlep all that stuff around and set up
* regular food and camp gear and clothing to stay alive during the journey, since with all that junk, they're only going to make 5-10 miles a day (maybe more if you have a horse, but then you have to afford a horse and food for it as well)

The cost of photography in the field would have been the equivalent of something like going on a manual backpack walking African safari today. Not the equivalent of picking up a point and shoot at the Best Buy down the street for 2 day's wages...

It was most certainly not available to even most PROFESSIONALS until about 1870 (when you could finally take photos and then develop them later or offsite), and was then still not available in any practical form to the masses until, as Derrel mentioned, roll film was invented and began to be produced in quantity around 1890. Even then, only very very eccentric people would have shelled out the dough to pursue this hobby regularly who were not well off.

Following is a fun graph depicting film camera sales versus digital camera sales and camera phone sales. I leave it as an exercise to the reader whether the OP's statements about raw availability of cameras represent an "informed position" or not:

(Note: due to the magnitude by which the OP was correct, you will have to click on the image and then click on it again, and then click on it yet again to actually read any of the writing I put on there)


edit: fixed height of graph to be correctly 50% higher than originally.

Note #2: There were almost as many >= 3 megapixel camera phones sold in 2013 alone as there were film cameras sold over the past 60 YEARS.

And the total number of >= 3 megapixel camera phones ever sold cumulatively is ~2.5 times greater than all film camera sold in the past 60 years. By 2015, this is projected to increase to a factor of 5.