will you SURVIVE
the digital revolution?
(or Perish Gloriously on the Barricades)
ACMP board member and Webmaster, TONY PAGE, discusses photographic life in the digital age.
At an ACMP copyright meeting recently it occurred to me that many of us attending had not realised just how much our chosen career was going to change over the next few years because of the digitisation of images and the growth of the Internet.
At a conservative estimate, no one will be shooting on film for commercial purposes within ten years (and many would claim within half that time). Long before that, film will cease to be used for anything other than basic image capture, with immediate transfer into digital form for manipulation and storage the norm. For many photographers, this has already happened.
"The whole character of the industry will change radically over the next few years."
I have a friend in the UK who is a news photographer. For years he has been sending his pics via laptop over the phone lines from his hotel room after putting his film through his Nikon scanner. Now he does a lot of his work using a digital camera.
I've another friend who used to do a lot of catalogue work. His main business effectively ceased to exist when a couple of major printers offered to shoot the work digitally in their inhouse studio for a ridiculously low fee - provided they got the whole printing job.
My partner is a graphic designer. As budgets were squeezed in the Asian meltdown he found he was making do by using more and more royalty free shots from Photodisk and other providers. And he now regularly downloads stock shots from other countries after sourcing them on line.
Recently, I was contacted by a designer in the States who was looking for someone to shoot stuff in Hong Kong and Africa. She'd seen my web site and noticed I'd lived and worked in both places. Just a few indications of the way things are going.
Andrew Craig, Collection 4
THE BIG SHAKEOUT
I believe the whole character of the photographic industry, and especially that sector of it represented by the ACMP, will change radically in character over the next few years. Domestic photography - portraiture, weddings - will continue much as before, although it will of course be digitally based. News photography, much of which is already digitally based, will switch over completely as soon as the technology is sufficiently sorted. But the advertising, commercial and magazine photography markets will suffer a big shakeout.
The trend towards vertical integration in the printing industry will continue. Catalogue style photography, where the real money is in the printing, will become ever more the province of the printer's inhouse photographer, as with Showads in Melbourne. Of course, the life of printed catalogues will be limited in the future, with the increasing use of the Internet and similar media for shopping. This may produce something of a resurrection for the independent catalogue photographer in the long run, but by that time many who have relied mainly on that source of income will be out of business or have changed speciality. In any event, with the advent of true broadband capacity, say in 2003, streaming video and 3D imaging will provide better sales tools than 2D photographs.
Let's have a look at advertising and corporate photography. The usual arguments against the use of stock photographs are that firstly, they are not shot specifically for the purpose in question, so the 'fit' is not right; secondly, they are of inferior quality and thirdly, are not exclusive to the user. Added to this could be the recent trend for them to be over-priced.
Nowadays it is very easy to buy royalty free photography of quite a high standard. If you don't believe me check out a friendly graphic designer's Photodisks or equivalent.
Many photographers have, shortsightedly in my view, adopted the attitude that "if you can't beat them, join them" and are selling their shots as fast as they can get them accepted.
In the old days, it was a highly expensive and generally unsatisfactory procedure to matt together images, retouch out telegraph poles, put in extra palm trees, etc. Now it's not. This has an effect on the stock photography business. I remember spending quite a lot of time searching for perfect beaches and the like for my stock library. Now montaging shots together can create virtually anything. So graphic elements are in big demand, the building blocks of images. And any of these can be slightly altered to differentiate them from the original.
MIDRANGE TO FEEL THE GREATEST EFFECTS
Naturally, there will always be a market for the talented photographer with a distinctive style whose work can lift an advertising campaign or annual report to higher levels (it's interesting to note that many famous international shooters are now very involved with digital manipulation). But how many of these jobs are there with the budgets to carry a Stuart Crossett, Graham Monro or Montalbetti and Campbell? Let's face it, the majority of us photographers, as in most professions, fall into the middleweight categories. And it's these middle range jobs where the digital revolution will have its greatest effects, where the necessary standard of image required can either be assembled from stock or a mixture of stock and a simple studio shot.
Everyone wants to expand his or her business. As margins get tighter, people often try to increase their income by providing more services, c/f the printers and catalogue photography. Photographers are briefed by graphic designers or agencies (or magazines). All these groups are already set up to manipulate images digitally, often with skilled individuals whose sole job is to do so. Most photographers at present do not see themselves sitting in front of a computer. They want to be out taking snaps. And they don't want people to fiddle about with their work afterwards.
Unfortunately, these days are gone. No image ever goes to print or anywhere else these days without being manipulated to some extent. Even in the past, there was quite a degree of manipulation done at the separations and printing stages, but perhaps the majority of photographers paid little attention to that, regarding their job as complete when they had delivered the trannie or print (never mind whether its printable in the press, it looks great on the lightbox!).
So to increase their income, it makes sense for designers and agencies to pay photographers as little as possible by assigning them simple shots. The commissioners can then use these images as building blocks to assemble into more complex finished products, for which they can charge more.
WHAT DO WE DO?
What can photographers do about this (apart from slashing their wrists)?
Well, for a start they can learn and become expert in image manipulation so that they can offer more complex images themselves, providing added value service. Or they can team up with a graphic designer, pooling their talents to offer a broader range of services, amortise their costs and compete more effectively. Or maybe they jump into the future and work out some way of utilising their talents in novel fields (link up with a web designer to provide digital imaging for client web sites?).
What they basically can't do is to ignore the whole problem and hope it will go away. It won't. The role of the still image in future advertising or any other form of communications is currently in flux. It may even be that it will diminish materially, as video or holographic options become more sophisticated and easily available. We need to think about the kind of issues I've mentioned here, and talk to each other about them. It's only in this way that we can ensure our profession has a future, and doesn't go the way of the typesetters.
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