Future of Photography

[Rob C]

Just want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post - thanks to Scott for posting the initial question and the very interesting opinions from the responders. Where do I stand? Sorry to say but at the moment I have wood splinters in my arse from sitting on the fence re the future!

Barry

I'm sure someone here can lend you tweezers; don't expect any help doing the extraction, though!

Rob C

[Rob C]

These last two Saturdays I've been shooting musos again, including Carol Kidd, MBE who is one of the best vocalists I've ever had the luck to see perform live (see Youtube). She electrifies an audience and any venue where she laughs, get's up from her table and does her thing without any concerns about money, contracts, my-people-your-people crap. Anyway, the point I'm creeping towards is this: delighted and excited to shoot, but now, days later, all I can manage to do is look at half of the untouched NEFs... it's really what it ever was: the doing is the thing, the photographing. Printing is like raising the dead. Maybe we should go live in Haiti. Can't be as bad for the circulation as is a computer.

I think Gerry Winogrand became enlightened before the end.

Rob C

P.S. À propos of the above quote - I should have given you this link:

http://youtu.be/Be8Z7wzyF_Y

http://youtu.be/KlIxE4qRBe8

It´s why I'm still working on the shots I took...

[Justinr]

I have been thinking about this a bit lately, and it came to a head for me when I re-processed some images taken in 2003 ( 6mp Nikon D100) and discovered that the new ones were significantly better than the old versions. We also visited Disneyland's attraction featuring future living conditions. Guess what? There were no photographs on the wall. But there were many large LCD panels featuring both traditional photography and other photographed works of art. On my reprocessed images, it was much easier to just re-post to my web site than reprint. And then I sat through a demo of photo apps which are really amazing. And then toss in iPhones, iPads, iPods, Facebook, etc. into the mix. So I am coming to the realization that the traditional photo print, wonderful as it is, is now on life support. It is just so much easier and more efficient to prepare an image for electronic display and sharing than it is to print, and generally the finished image looks better on a monitor anyhow. This pretty much parallels the growth of print media, which is morphing into eBooks and the like. I recently subscribed to Moose Peterson's eMagazine, which is amazing in that it can include wonderful images as well as movie clips, a real glimpse of the future. Anyhow, I digress. This issue is much more complex than I have the ability to discuss, but digital capture will allow photography to go in directions none of us have probably thought about. I would be interested in what you all have to say!

All this talk of how print is dead and the wood pulp forests of the world can sleep easy at night due to everything being handled by the 'pooter and then guess what, yep a large UK bank group suffers a major IT meltdown and the bank's high street staff are reduced to running around with slips of paper in envelopes. Ulster Bank (part of the RBS group) have just informed it's customers that it could be another two weeks (over a month in all) before things are put right.

Can't say that I am the greatest fan of handing everything over to the interweb thingy, we are just too vulnerable and the fact it's increasingly being used to monitor us just makes me even more uncomfortable about handing too much of my life over to binary code.

[Rob C]

I hate computers as a means of banking or of anything else that should be confidential. I'm even reluctant to buy anything that way, not just because of problems associated with card-risk, but also that I dislike the idea of small people being forced out of business by dotcoms. Never mind dotcoms - all we need are the friggin' industrial estate giants that are able to buy more cheaply from the main companies than can the little guys; as they do with farmers, so they do with High Street specialist camera shops: suffocate them. And some of us think that we benefit from that? Eyes wide shut.

Rob C

[louoates]

I think we all benefit by vigorous competition. I seem to remember many dot coms starting out in garages.

[Rob C]

I think we all benefit by vigorous competition. I seem to remember many dot coms starting out in garages.

Yep, and AIDS used to start out as a pleasant interlude too, or so I'm told.

Vigorous competition is fine as long as it's played on that level playing field; it's the distortions through purchasing power to which I object. There is no moral reason why a multi-national can buy a widget from a factory at a price unobtainable to the small man; competition of scale should be internal competition of scale, pricing advantages made by the giant through good housekeeping, not by flexing his buying muscle in the face of the maker of said widget. It's nothing short of a mugging in the street and not only manufacturers are mugged, eventually the customers are too. If you knew anything about the fashion industry you'd have seen it happen every month as smaller suppliers were forced to refuse gigantic retailers' terms/conditions and close the door. In Scotland, pretty much the bulk of the knitwear industry was wiped out or moved into non-Scottish hands or had production moved to the Far East. I experienced that first-hand and it cripples. No, it kills. That's basically why I moved out of fashion into calendar production and pin-up photography.

As I've said here before, my local Hasselblad dealer lost his dealership because he couldn't buy at the prices that the big chains could sell! So, tell me how the customer gained long-term value from that experience? The shop eventually folded, and now there's no local camera shop anymore. Hands-on experience of something exotic before you buy? Dream on, or live in the metropolis and pray you strike lucky.

Rob C

[slackercruster]

Slobodan, print may be dying, but the first time there's a high-altitude nuclear burst it's going to come back in a rush. People will have to learn how to find their way without GPS, and entertainment in our bars, under candlelight, will be "live."

Scares the hell out of me to see how much we're moving toward utter reliance on stuff that's completely vulnerable to an EMP surge, especially considering the kind of nutcases we see moving toward a nuclear capability.

....http://www.survivalistboards.com/

[Rob C]

Good Lord! No more electric guiitars!

Rob C