We live in the golden age, whether you think so you not, and 50 or 60 years from, those will to live a golden age. Get the point?
If you walk around like you missed it, you'll never get any where. Times change, and you have to change with it in everything you do, including marketing. You want the "new golden age," start using modern tools in your marketing, like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter. I have read so many case studies on small (very small) businesses using these sites to get very rewarding assignments and jobs. I am starting to see success from using them and I have only been really using them for 2 months.
Joe, it isn't anything to do with new forms of marketing; such methods simply direct some available work to wherever. The point that
you are missing is that both quantity and value (financial) of photography available has been crippled. Was a time a lot of us were quite well off; I no longer know any of us, non-mythicals, that is, who is now making pots of gold.
Simply working your ass off is no judgement of any Golden Age; it is measured in reward both financial and spiritual. You can work from seven until seven or eight or even through the night, but when you realise that the guy building the road makes more than you do, I fear any GA is largely of the mind. Where the many guys who, like myself, once flew off with an armful of models to top hotels wherever they decided was going to make a great location, spend a couple of weeks there and feel really alive? It's become so rare now that it's news. As I mentioned before, when I came in, I do believe it was already more or less during the decline of said GA. Do you remember Sed cards, index cards by any name, when so many girls had exotic photography locations plastered all over the place? Every second Page 3 model had the Seychelles, the Bahamas, and
credit lines to show they were not fakes. Maybe you are looking in the wrong place for the clue: ask the model agencies how it has changed. Of course, you run the danger of bumping into corporate-speak, where everybody is doing better than they ever did before, regardless of how many go out of business. Honesty isn't good news.
Rob C