The following post may be a sign of someone slowly slipping into madness as I officially quit the school today, so please read with that in mind :).
The more I persevere with this business the more I become aware of a few realities.
Software is streets ahead of cameras. It is the future and the at the same time, the looming nemesis of real photography as a craft.
Cameras are mechanically improving only incrementally (mirrorless was a decent leap, but so very glacially applied*). The real camera improvements are firmware related and these look sluggish, almost apologetic compared to extenal software.
If camera improvements are the backroads of photographic advancement and firmware are the sealing of said dusty roads, then software is the brand new highway to problem solving, for better or worse. Rather than accept the perfect frame blocking object, we remove it. Don’t like the sky, swap it, need more Bokeh, enable it.
Even doing things “manually” with sliders is starting to become a thing to question. Every day seems to cough up a new “AI fix”. We are not quite there yet, but soon Grass Hopper, soon**.
It is not unreasonable these days to buy a camera that falls short of expectations, only to have those expectations realised shortly after via firmware or even the need eliminated by software.
All the concerns we photographers have with sharpness, noise, colour accuracy, distortions etc, are all doomed to historical obscurity with the looming wall of super smart software. Sensor size is not actually a big deal, computational power is though. I see a time when the camera is only offerring a hint, a guide for post processing to perfect in an infinite variety of ways. Just a matter of the emphasis shifting. A computer alone cannot make a knife physically sharper, but a soft photo of a knife, that is another thing.
Photographers still need to buy gear and learn how to use it. they need to be there and make the effort, to edit the end product and store it wisely, but the role is becoming quite defined. Perseverance is probably the most important characteristic of the future photographer as one path leads to another, staying true is key. You may simply be an oddity if you stick to one trade. As time moves on, most photographic skills will become less difficult or evaporate to one extent or another.
One thing that is apparent is that specialists are becoming less and less a defined specialist. Want to be a cinematographer? Fine, but to get there you will likely have to also be your own sound engineer, editor, writer, director and publicist, so get good at eveything up to a point. This also helps you in your future, because it never hurts to understand someone else’s point of view. The same with stills. Post processing is the future, but not at the expense of being able to take an image properly or define an image worth taking.
Following up from that, cameras will become less relevant and more specialised as the base line becomes better and/or more accepted. Ironically, the camera is returning to much the same dynamic it had in the fim era, that of being a highly specialised, made to purpose tool***. Nobody in normal life needs a complicated, 40+ MP full frame with a collection of monster f1.x prime lenses. To be honest, neither do many pro’s, but at least they want to carry them around.
Most people get by with a phone and in the real world that is how it should be. Carrying a specialised bit of gear for any application means you are either a paid specialist or serious hobbyist, but either way you have made a conscious effort to carry that gear on top of your dailty needs. This is not most of us, or not even any of us all the time****.
Humans will do what humans do and ignore world hunger to focus on perfecting things like the fastest car, smartest fridge, the perfect lens or most powerful camera etc. Great news for those of us who think it makes a difference and lets hope somehow it can, but the long term future of photography is to become more and more specialisd until it becomes absorbed into the easy to use and homogenous “life enabling” tech bubble. We do all this of course, while lamenting our lost past and worshipping the “old ways”, but that’s humans for you.
Live it up while you can. Your Mk15 what ever with f1.0 door stopper lens is sitting in full sunshine at the moment, but the sunset is coming and startlingly quickly, when much of this will not matter to anyone but the owner/user.
Gloomy?
like these shiny pipes, much of what we are obsessed by now will loose it’s relevance, but that does not mean history is blanked out. What happens now is important, it’s just changing. Of note, this is a shot taken on a 12 year old camera, with a kit lens.
The only element that will not change is the human being.
The trick is to be best you can be at what you do.
Learn the tech, buy and use the gear, keep your eyes and mind open and follow the true path the best that you can. There will be dictractions, plenty of them (called fads or trends, evil things really), but remember that what you are photographing is not changing, only what you are doing it with.
People are people, emotions are transcendant, recording history is a one time gig and connections always matter. The worst thing you can do is not bother or be careless with your recorded memories.
Do good work, share, connect with people, love animals and above all, be kind.
Oh, and people still paint with brushes and stuff. Go figure.
*Arguably the right time would have been when digital became main stream, but why not wait another 15-20 years.
**In my adult life we have moved from mobile phones in cars being science fiction (and “smart” meant they could redial), to super computers in our pockets and self driving cars. The speed of this is picking up, so assuming we still have a planet to enjoy in the future, the next steps will gobble up humble photography like the internet replaced the fax machine.
***The four great expansive moments in photography all came down to either philanthropy (Kodak gifting a generation a camera) or enabling tech (colour print, auto exposure, auto focus, digital). between these groth “bilps”, regular photographers plugged along.
****I have only met one person who actually carried a camera with them everywhere (a well used M4 Leica) and that stopped when they realised that basically everyone does now!