Our pictures -- things that used to hang on the wall -- are now TV screens, and the dominant thing on a TV screen is not text, but photography. It can either be still or motion, but motion is becoming dominant (look at MSN some day -- most of the links are to video.) Because of the insatiable maw of the net and the 24-hour-a-day schedule of a couple of hundred cable channels, combined with the constant demand for newness, it seems to me that there's a huge video market out there. AND, there's very little on these screens that can't be shot with the video camera, even if used as a still. A high-resolution still camera is pretty much wasted when the view screen is a standard HD monitor or TV set.
Also: there are now literally tens of millions of people who own and operate still cameras that are good enough that their shots turn up on TV and in magazines all the time -- most still news shots, and quite a bit of video, that I see on local news programs, and even quite a few national news programs, are shot by amateurs who happen to be where some newsworthy event is taking place, and they have a camera that is good enough that the images are suitable for national distribution. Not as good as a pro would do, but *good enough.* The point is that an awful lot of still content is now being shot by amateurs or semi-pros -- photography is becoming a distributed effort, like blogging. If a local station in Minneapolis is given the choice between a routine grip-and-grin photo of a chamber of commerce event, or a mom trying to catch her baby thrown from a burning building in LA, they'll go with the mom-and-baby every time. And there are pictures of something like that *every day* from somewhere in the world -- fires, floods, shooting, cute animals. Local TV content pros are becoming a thing of the past, because they can't compete on image shock. There will still be room for full pros, but that room will be diminishing and the prices will be falling, except for the few who have the PR chops to make themselves into stars.
Therefore: I think the future, for photographers who want to make careers out of it, is most likely in video. In video, it's much harder for amateurs or for semi-pros to get in, because the initial, up-front costs are so much higher, not only for equipment, but for crews, and for the necessary bureaucracy -- salaries, cost accounting, bureaucratic matters like getting permits to shoot, and for the marketing of the video. If I were fairly young and looking to make a career out of photography (not as an artist, but as a professional-for-hire) I would definitely go with video.
I might perhaps do what James Russell is doing, but in reverse -- focus on the video, but offer the services of a young, talented but cheap still photographer as an extra service.
JC
