It's already started. The Nikon Z's won't ship till the end of September (earliest) and already the YouTube reviewers have found a "major" point of contention.

Chrysta does a furniture ad.

Here it is: Tony Northrup will be recommending that professional photographers NOT purchase the Z6 or Z7 because......wait for it......the camera does not feature dual card slots. This is his position having not yet used either camera and I will be interested to see if his position changes once he is delivered to New York City, feted and entertained by Nikon's PR agency who will, no doubt, provide a rational and defensible argument as to why, going forward, it's okay for their two cameras to only have one card slot...and a QXD at that. That happens, I think, this weekend so I'm sure we'll know more after checking  Tony's YouTube channel on Monday. 

I'm neutral on the whole "dual card slot imbroglio." I understand the only good rationale and that is to have a duplicate copy of important, once in a life time, photographs from non-repeating events or imaging opportunities. Got it. If a card goes bad you've still got one in the second slot with which to save your bacon. But I have to say that I have either been incredibly lucky over the years or the incidence of card failures (among authentic cards from well known makers) is wildly over-reported. 

It's been a while since I experienced any sort of photographic equipment failure other than just wearing out lenses or something occurring from drop damage. But I do get the point; a second card slot is a relatively cheap and easy way to get a redundant back-up. 

This is, of course, why every photographer worth his government issued, official professional photographer licensing card here in the U.S.A. (not a real thing) carries back-up equipment for everything. When I go on location to shoot a non-repeatable corporate executive head shot I always take along duplicates of all mission critical equipment: A camera and a back up camera. A range of lenses and an exact duplicate of the first range of lenses. Back up batteries for each camera. A back up camera strap for each in case my strap frays or unexpectedly snaps into pieces from overuse. A set of studio flashes, and a second set of back up studio flashes. Enough memory cards to back up the back up cards in the main and back up cameras. I generally bring along a second set of prescription glasses and a second set of prescription sunglasses. 

But that's just the core gear. I bring an assistant, and also a back up assistant in case the first assistant eats some bad mayonnaise at lunch and becomes incapacitated. I bring along a second set of clothes for myself and also for my assistants in case we fall in mud or some fiber eating microbes begin to disintegrate our original clothes. I pack a lunch, and then a second lunch in case the first lunch is lost or destroyed. I bring along empty Pelican cases just in case our primary cases are somehow destroyed during the shoot. 

I carry plenty of back up tripods because you never know when one will short circuit or become humidity damaged. We bring duplicate light stands just in case someone runs over our primary collection of light stands with a forklift or other warehouse vehicle. And soft boxes! Dozens and dozens in all sizes. Many duplicates in case the fiber glass rods snap...

Finally, we bring along a second car in case the first car breaks down, either on the way to or the way from, our client's chosen location. All of this duplication is cost intensive but I don't see how else one could call oneself a "professional photographer" unless you are willing to dive onto the top of a live grenade of equipment spending and required portage costs in order to give your client unmatched service and piece of mind. The cheap bastards deserve nothing less... 

At times though I look at this endless imagined need for back up and duplication in different ways. I've never acquired a back up spouse and so far I've experienced no job stopping corruption, or total spouse failure. I only have the one house and that's been working well since about 1995. And I've actually flown in planes with single engines and if there was ever a perceived need for redundant back up that would be it.

I would be interested to know if you've recently experienced any card failures from modern (post 2010) memory cards. If you routinely save money by buying the Russian surplus or Chinese counterfeit cards from the Amazing "marketplace" you are on your own. But if you are using current "big brand" cards that came from a trusted source I would be most interested in being proven wrong and saying a big mea culpa to Tony Northrup (whose videos I actually very much enjoy --- even when I don't always agree). 

Let me know if the single card slot on the Nikon Z's is really the big "deal killer" for you. And why. 

Thanks. KT

Can we have a quick discussion about the Nikon announcement?

I had a chance to read all the promotional stuff from Nikon this morning, as well as the mindless chatter of articles on DPReview. My take is that Nikon produced a very nice first try of a mirrorless camera. They got some stuff right and then swung and missed on some other stuff. If I was a Nikon shooter I'd think about adding one of the two bodies to my inventory for things like those times when you really do need a silent shutter or when you really need to have autofocus that works well in video. I think their choice of sensors is perfect; one for ultimate image quality and one for great overall quality and speed (24 and 45 megapixels). 

I haven't handled one but it looks like they got the grip right. I'm pretty sure the lens mount will end up being a good decision down the road although I hate the idea of having to buy new lenses when the old Nikon F lenses still work so well. An interesting possible benefit to the people who aren't thinking of making the switch from Nikon F to Nikon Z any time in the near future might be that with other people switching the used market will be flooded with excellent F glass (and bodies) at ever lowering prices. I'm still looking for that perfect D810 but at a $1200 price point. It will happen, it might just take a bit more time.

I'm also happy with the overall styling of the camera but time will tell if it's too small to handle well or if it is too light to provide a solid and vibration resistant platform. By popular demand (and marketing necessity) the cameras feature five axis image stabilization with the Z lenses and three axis stabilization with older AFS lenses. People will love that the AF points in the flagship camera occupy the majority of the frame. 

Videographers will scratch their collective heads, wondering why some video features were not improved vis-a-vis the D850 but most will take a wait and see position pending actually shooting some files and looking at them. Nikon seems to view suppliers like Atomos as a natural ally and feature supplimenter for video in that high quality codecs (the sort of which can be handled in camera by GH5 cameras) are only available when using an external video recorder. If you want anything more than 100 Mbs 8 bit files you'll need to use the HDMI port to export into a digital recorder to unlock the good stuff. In a certain way it makes sense but when a two year old camera can suck up faster bit rate files with much more information and then write them in camera you have to wonder how serious Nikon is about the video market....

So, good feature sets, nice new lens mount, in body image stabilization, some backward compatibility with F lenses, a pretty body design, and full frame UHD video are all really nice and useful. We like to think about having these things. But where has the ball been dropped? Where was there potential that remains unrealized? Let's see.

I'll start with the battery. It's a variant of the EL-EN 15 and it's only rated at 330 shots. I know that the camera has continuous live view and those faster processors suck up juice like crazy but I also know that if the marketing team hadn't badgered the designers to try and get close to Sony's dwarfish camera body size they could have made the camera a bit bigger, easier to handle, a more stable platform for handholding, and a home for a bigger and more enduring battery. I think a battery grip will help but one will still get about half the battery mileage one gets with an off the shelf, traditionally mirrored DSLR.

The video specs are nothing to write home about. The 8 bit, 4:2:0 in-camera codec seems underpowered when Panasonic GH5 and GH5s cameras can write up to 400 Mbs in camera and offer a wide variety of 10 bit, 422 files that can be recorded in-camera onto a standard V90 SD card. The GH5S can also offer codecs that allow you to shoot 4K at 60p while the Nikon is restricted to 30p in 4K. According to pundits, who may or may not have actually shot any real video with the new Nikons, the rolling shutter at the full frame, 4K setting is nothing to write home about. 

Finally, even though Panasonic showed the way into the hearts and minds of serious filmmakers with in camera tools such as a vector scope and a wave form monitor Nikon chose to stick to the hobbyist route and leave these valuable features out. If you are a serious video shooter and you are using an Atomos Ninja Something or Other you'll be able to take advantage of those advanced features and also "false color" in spite of these features not being offered on the camera. 

From what I'm reading they did get the EVF just about right. Very high res and very nice eyepiece optics but they wimped out in the engineering a bit and stuck with a 60 fps refresh rate instead of pushing the envelope and implementing a 120 fps lens rate as debuted in the Panasonic GH5S.

To sum up: I think Nikon put some good thought and design skills into making a better body design than Fuji or Sony have been able to do. Unlike some naysayers I think the bigger lens mount will lead to more interesting and higher performances lenses (if Nikon rises to the challenge). For most social media and web-based video, corporate or otherwise, I think the video specs are quite usable and you could consider this a true, hybrid video camera (thought not as well provisioned as at least two of the less expensive cameras from Panasonic). 

People will bitch and whine, mostly for no good reason, about things like the single card slot for memory cards, or the fact that the camera just takes QXD cards. People will always bitch about price. But the majority of camera buyers will be satisfied that these will be  great work and play cameras; especially for people who have long used Nikon and are bored with their current cameras and ready to see just how good photography can be with a well designed mirrorless camera with a nice EVF. 

It really doesn't matter who was first to market. Panasonic rolled out a full on mirrorless concept ten years ago and the innovation alone certainly didn't rocket them to the top of the market. In many ways I think Nikon was smart to let everyone else grapple with the complexity of innovation and to come along and leverage all the engineering work and the heavy lifting of marketing ground work, done by others, in making mirrorless a successful concept on the eyes of consumers. Nikon was able to continue to sell millions of more traditional cameras while Olympus, Panasonic, Sony and Fuji worked hard at selling the "concept" of a new kind of camera to somewhat wary consumers. Now that the concept has been driven home the vast majority of the worldwide market now feel comfortable in making the transition and Nikon has swooped in with no legacy baggage in the space and should be able to grab a great R.O.I. because both they and Canon still own most of the mindshare among photographers who spend and upgrade. A nice strategy. The Zune was one of the first MPEG portable music players but it is now buried in a shallow grave in the tech history grave yard while late arrival, Apple, cleaned up in the space and then used their iPod product as the technical launching pad for the insanely successful iPhone. 

Will I buy one of these new cameras? Sure. I'll make construct a rationalization around the idea of just getting the 24 meg version and the 50mm lens and becoming a "one camera and one lens" purist. But you know me. By the end of the year I'll have most of the inventory squirreled away in my bag. 

At this point though I'm finding a lot more to like about the GH5S. It's not just a video camera. But more on that later.

What are your thoughts on Nikon's announcement? Will they be able to deliver in bulk? Will they kick Sony's butt? Are still cameras just a dead end? Comment?   

Those days when you think of selling a couple thousand pounds of cameras, lights and stuff, buying an old M4 and a 50mm Summicron and walking away from the routine. Where did I put that brick of Kodachrome?

I thought you might like to see what a video frame from a GH5S, shooting in L. Monochrome with an Olympus 12-100mm f4.0 Pro, looks like when we pull a still frame.

A frame from a 4K video clip shot at Esther's Follies on a Panasonic GH5S.

The cast is doing a script rehearsal. Fascinating to me. 

(Below: my edited version. The target I'll aim for in the promotional video)

(Maybe with a bit less added noise the next time around.....). 

I've read over the last few years that we will soon be able to pull still frames from our videos. I decided this afternoon to see what a 4K still frame, taken directly from a handheld video clip shot at 30 fps (1/60th of a second shutter) with the lens set at f4.0.

Well, this is what mine looks like. I would guess that by using a tripod I could have made the frame even sharper. I would also add a bit more midrange contrast to the image but wanted to present the file the way it was shot for video.

It's interesting to me to see just how nice the frame looks prior to grading or post processing.

My GH5S gets more interesting every day that I shoot with it.

As I think about the new Nikon mirrorless cameras I find myself looking back at work done on a wide range of Nikon cameras. From the D100 through the D850, and lots of stops in between.

from a rehearsal of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" circa 2006.

If you want to figure out what kind of camera (and what brand of camera) you really like to shoot with it may be instructional for you to go back and look at which cameras (and brands) have cycled through your hands with the greatest frequency. What did you like about them and what led you to change into other systems. 

One of the system I seem to gravitate toward most often is Nikon. Specifically, traditional Nikon DSLR cameras. I can generally pick up any of the cameras they've made in the past two decades and figure them out in minutes. They feel good. And, with hindsight being better than presbyopia, I can see that even the older models were, in fact, good performers. By that I mean the images you could create with them were excellent. Some I would rate as excellent in their time but some were just flat out excellent, even when compared to today's cameras. 

I looking through the files I came across a set of images that I shot for the theater production of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Some were done with with one of my least favorite cameras, the D200 and some were taken with one of my favorite Nikon cameras, the D2X (see image at the top of the article). 

There is an undercurrent of thought, becoming more prevalent among photographers, which posits that the camera industries much touted advancements in the last ten years have been less spectacular than marketing and industry reporting would have us believe. As I look through various files I've come across material we shot with a 2002 Kodak DCS 760 which our clients used as 4x6 foot point of purchase displays; and marveled at how good it looks. Ditto for the much underrated (image quality wise) Kodak DCS SLR/n. We shot a series of images that became large wall graphics using the low ISO settings on that camera and the files seemed better than some of the images I've pulled off much more recent and higher res cameras. (The SLR/n had an ISO 25 setting that worked by making multiple exposures into one file while reducing noise via anomaly cancellation processing. The end result was files of incredible detail and sharpness with no discernible noise. The trade off was the need to shoot with continuous light and the long shooting a processing times...). 

Even the files from the early D100 were good. The sensor in that camera was a 6 megapixel one in an APS-C size. That camera's biggest fault was a tiny raw buffer. You got four shots and then the camera went dormant for while in order to process them....

I have several favorites from the middle years of Nikon digital cameras, including: The D2XS. It was prone to noise at any ISO setting above 640 but the files in the sweet range (200-400) were/are competitive with anything on the market today, when comparing like sizes. It was a rock solid camera that nailed focus without much fuss and yielded great color without much sweat in post. 

The D700 deserves to be considered as one of the legendary cameras of the digital age. And the next big step up was the D800/D800e. It's six years on since the D800e and yet, when I compare files with a D810 at ISO 100 I'm sure not seeing six years of quality increase or magic. A bit more dynamic range for people destined to shoot outside in the sun but for most people either camera is so capable of delivering amazing files that the recurrent limitation will be that of most people's technical skills or the quality of their lens collection.

I sold my mid-term Nikons and jumped to Canon at a time when Nikon didn't have any full frame cameras with a resolution over 12 megapixels. Canon had come out with the 5D2 and it was a pretty amazing camera in it's time. I was personally happy with the D700 but I had a few clients who were clearly mesmerized by the marketing hype of high resolution and I felt like I needed to keep up with the Joneses. We weren't nearly as smart back then. I bought the technical enticements hook, line and sinker.

When Nikon launched the D3X and I looked at the price tag I felt entirely vindicated for choosing the Canon and it took a while for Nikon to step up and match. The Canons were great cameras but after Nikon got up to speed with the D750 I switched back again (and there were "sub-systems" in between). 

Now I am actually waiting with a bit of excitement to see what Nikon presents us at tomorrow's launch. I can get all lofty and say that I don't need anything beyond what I have today but I'll just repeat a quote from the character of Mr. Burns on "The Simpsons" when Lisa Simpson asks him (paraphrasing here): 'You are one of the richest men in the world why keep chasing stuff?' and he responds that while he is quite rich  ----- "I would gladly trade it all for just a little more!"

I'm by no means rich but, where cameras are concerned I often have the feeling that I too would, "Gladly trade them all for some just a little newer..."

Currently working through the obvious logic dysfunction I've describe here....

Looking back I am amazed at how much I disliked the D200 and how much I enjoyed making photographs with the D2xs. Perhaps one of the new mirrorless models will raise the bar in some noticeable way which will make it easier for me to rationalize yet another unnecessary expense. 

When a camera has certain performance parameters that exceed your expectations. By a lot. Today it was the GH5S shooting black and white video.

I recently acquired a Panasonic GH5S and I hadn't had the opportunity to give it a thorough test until this week. While I've shot some RAW stills with the camera one doesn't really buy a $2500, 10 megapixel hybrid camera unless one is looking for some specialized performance, and, in this case that performance is all about the video. I have an original GH5 but when the S version came out I read up and realized that the dual ISO feature and the improvements (though subtle) in video image quality and overall color science would be a plus for any projects I might consider.

When the opportunity came along to trade one of the two GH5 originals for an almost new GH5S I came up with a check for the difference (fair is fair) and didn't hesitate.

I spent part of last week and any spare moment during last weekend familiarizing myself with the video menus and the handling feel of the camera when used as a video camera (as opposed to how one handles the camera when shooting stills...). I also tested the codecs to find the right balance between creating files that would work in our typical end media and not getting lost in

Robin Wong discovers that older cameras can be very good photography making machines.

https://blog.mingthein.com/2018/08/20/digital-classic-robin-reviews-the-original-canon-5d/#more-17429

I guess a lot of us are wrapped up in a mid-first-decade of the new century reappraisal/re-appreciation of just how good the camera tech was for the third generation of full frame gear.

Would be interested to hear back from the newest D700 users to see what they think. Chime in!

I spent $17 on a total "piece of crap" lens and I had a fun time shooting with it yesterday. Hello "Holga for Nikon." Can't wait to use this "glass" on a new Nikon Z with an adapter......hmmm.

I had a serious purpose for being nose deep in Amazon.com on Thursday. We'd just gotten the "thumbs up" on fun video projects from three different clients and I wanted to buy a Thunderbolt SSD drive to put all my footage on for faster editing. I found what I hope will be a good drive but when I was on the site I made the mistake of looking around at the Nikon lenses to see if there was any particular focal length I had missed and needed more than oxygen....

Nothing from Nikon bubbled up but when I started looking at third party lenses I came across the most counter-intuitive lens I could possible imagine. The Holga people have begun packaging the famous(?) Holga 60mm f8.0 lens that has been "featured" on their cameras for decades for various other brands of camera. You can now buy a 60mm Holga f8.0 for your Nikon, Canon and micro four thirds cameras. The lenses come with the appropriate mount for each brand. The build quality is utter crap and focusing is strictly by zone. There is no way to change apertures and even the smartest cameras with the best Auto-ISO will be mystified by exposure with this "gem." 

I should mention that there is one decent feature set: The Holga lens comes complete with front and rear caps.

The vignetting is so strong that the lens acts like a t16 instead of an f8.0. The edges are monstrously dark and I found that the highest precision approach to both focus and exposure was ---- trial and error. Much error, even more trial. 

I should mention that the lens (which I assume is a one element lens design) is not sharp anywhere in the frame. The one benefit for all you people obsessed with camera weight and size is that the all-plastic lens body construction probably weighs in at about 2 ounces and it will fit in the front pocket of your most hipster trousers.

Here (above and below) is my gallery from Saturday's Holga Photo Safari in downtown Austin. See the attack of the electric scooters!!!! See the dark edges!!! No Instagram filters were used in the degradation of these images!!! See flare an anamorphic lens lover could be proud of!!!!

Why did I buy it? Why do I do anything? Lack of impulse control and a credit card balance that the issuing bank seems to be ignoring.... Will I keep it? Well, of course. How else will I be able to invent a whole new style for myself for the future?

Can't wait slap an adapter on the lens and mount it on the GH5S. With the vignetting and distortion of the lens coupled with some V-Log and beginner color grading I think I'll have the kind of winning new "authentic" vibe I need to reach a whole new generation of photo buyers. Cheers!

We're heading into the busy Fall season.

Selena R. at Willie Nelson's Ranch.

It seems to always start out slow in August. After the first week or two with little, or no, business I begin to panic; certain that no e-mail and no texts means I'll probably never work again. The phone doesn't count as clients forgot about calling when they learned I'd respond to texts. I start planning to pull money out of my savings account or to sell plasma, or both. I tell Belinda we can no longer afford anything other than beans and rice. We turn the thermostat up a little bit more, even though we're mired in the hottest month of the year. 

Then the dam breaks and work starts to flow in. Next week is spoken for. A solid week that weaves stills, video, stills and then more video. The first few days of the following week are set aside for editing, and after that we start on a big project that will have me and my videographer in San Antonio for a couple days a week for most of September. And there's stuff starting to fill in around the edges. 

We've re-introduced fresh vegetables into our diets and the thermostat has crawled back down. Belinda reminds me that this happens every year. We call it "The Sigh Before School Starts." Parents scramble to get their kids ready and then the race to get half a year's worth of projects done between now and the 15th of December starts in earnest. 

We'll have the same sinking feeling from Dec. 15th until January 15th. Would someone please remind me in January that things cycle up as the holidays recede into the past?

(remember that short period when I bought a Canon 1D mk3 and some Zeiss lenses and played around with that camera for a while? It was actually pretty good).

Photography as ever changing content in today's advertising paradigm.

Selena. Singer with "Rosie and the Ramblers."

 It's interesting and bit depressing to understand how the role of photography has changed in the realm of advertising. I know many of my readers are hobbyists and don't really care how some art director in San Diego or Miami intends to use images in the course of her work but there is a shift in the basic understanding of how photography works in advertising that affects its role and value to each of us across our cultural map. 

In the days of limited and expensive distribution which defined print advertising it was impossible to cost effectively provide consumers (and specific target audiences) with new visual content that changed daily. The mandate then was to create advertising that had a temporal stickiness to it so that the visual impression an ad created would have enough impact to provide results over the span of weeks or months. The strength of an ad's impression was also a determined by how many times people passed along a magazine, newspaper, brochure or direct mail piece to another audience member. 

Since advertising agencies and their clients had limited and expensive vehicles for their advertising it was important to the process to develop a truly creative message for delivery. This meant that quality time was spent conceiving and testing their "one way" communication with a target market. Since photography and illustration were the primary sources of stickiness a lot of time (and money) were invested in getting just the right image to carry the message and branding for the client. 

In a time when national advertising placement in magazines could cost as much as $100,000 per insertion, per magazine; and when multiple magazines and newspapers needed to be used to effectively hit a complete target market, the costs of media always exceeded, by an enormous multiple, the cost of image production. But because each volley of ads was (relatively) so expensive and needed to have a long shelf life no expenses were spared in really fine-tuning the photography or illustrations used to market client's goods and services. Even for a simple, industrial shot in the studio we might have a day of pre-production meetings, several days to acquire or build props, followed by a full day of photographing in order to squeeze out the absolute best image possible. The image was the lever that made the expense of advertising work.

After our jobs as photographers were done the final images were sent out by the advertising agency for color separations which were then delivered to the magazine or printer. Good color separations were always a blend of art and science and, with retouching, could cost thousands of dollars. The negatives sent to each individual magazine could cost hundreds of dollars per set. No wonder art directors paid so much attention to detail and to a workflow that gave ample time for fine-tuning and quality control at every step. 

And, I am sure that a digital variation of this exists at the high end of national advertising even today. But I'm equally sure that the dollars spent on traditional placed media are a tiny fraction of the share they used to command in the overall pie of advertising expenditures. Access to the web changed everything. Advertisers have trained consumers to expect daily (and sometimes hourly) engagement; complete with spontaneous feedback loops. Now that "placement" on the web is just about free there is far less concern with getting individual messaging absolutely correct and able to withstand a long run cycle. It's been replaced with the need for constant content constantly supplied to an ever hungry audience. Trading a quantity experience for a quality art product.

If advertisers needed to make each image as creative and well produced as they did back in the time when print was dominant the cost of production, because of the demand for quantity and diversity of images, would be insurmountable and not sustainable. Now the image is secondary to just "having the door open" and rotating new visual inventory to the daily audiences on the web. The need for quantity is also driven by the granualization of the overall media landscape; even on the web.

We are rarely called upon now to make one glorious and remarkable image for clients these days. Instead, we are called upon to work quickly, with minimal pre-production, and to make a wide range of images (an image library) over the course of one engagement such that we can provide an inventory of diverse images which can be pushed into the ever hungry delivery channels as quickly as "content providers" can package an image with a terse little marketing story, whipped out at speed by an "associate" copy writer or a copy-writing app. 

Often, when I show current work to old school photographers they (rightfully?) grouse about little details that would not have passed through the previous workflow process without correction or retouching. A wisp of hair out of place, a wrinkle in a shirt, a hanging thread at a seam, a less than perfect composite, a slight color shift, all things which would be critically deficient for an image destined to lead a month long or quarter long campaign, lingering like fine perfume on the market. But none of those things are now deal breakers (or even speed bumps) in the current hourly manufacture and upload of content for the web. 

We now have clients who bring iPhones to the shoots with the stated intention of shooting everything we do during a shoot and sending the BHS images off to a remote designer who packages them and inserts them at Medium.com, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, often creating a buzz campaign before we've even taken a break for lunch. This is not surreptitious behind-the-scenes behavior; it is mapped out as part of the shoot experience at the stage of preliminary negotiations. 

A recent shoot for a theater featured me shooting marketing stills, a video production company shooting a BHS video for immediate upload, and a photographer from the daily newspaper shooting the same BHS images and uploading them in bursts to his editor. The press photographer's images didn't hit print, they were delivered directly to the daily news feed on the newspapers website. And, of course, as soon as I got back to the office and started post production on the primary marketing images I was busy selecting my favorites and uploading them to this blog and to Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn so I could  grab a tiny bit of attention while the stuff was still fresh......

When each image has a lighter load to carry, and each image is desperately disposable, then each image is far less valuable. They become less like distinct art objects and more like the nightly local TV news. Bland stories, competently (barely) told, there to act that the mortar between bricks of advertising, and gone stale five minutes after the sign-off. Whether you admit it or not this downward appraisal of the value of individual images permeates through the collective psyche of our social structuring/ our culture. The endless flow diminishes the value and the attention paid to each individual pin prick of photographic presentation. 

The most interesting aspect for some of us is the way a diminished level of production value is rationalized; the way the shortcoming are re-packaged to become features. Any flaws (either in conception or image making ) are supposed to have been done intentionally in the pursuit of "authenticity." The idea being that flawed or poorly constructed images or messages will be more positively received by their intended audiences precisely because they "appear" to be a more honest message capsule. Less a corporate message and more just a slice of life. 

Am I depressed or "bitter" about all this? Not really. I presume that the overall market will rush to the bottom and soon nearly all web-ad images will be made quickly, mostly on the way to lunch (which will be recorded), by whatever phone is handy, and will become so bland and undifferentiated that data analysis will come to determine that all the energy wasted in loading up the web is ultimately inconsequential to sales which will bring a new generation of ad pros around 180 degrees, hellbent on creating a brilliant, standalone message that will be printed beautifully on thick and expensive card stock and then hand delivered to intended recipients, with a flourish. All of a sudden the mantra will be: They were so innovative. They were the first agency to reject the homogeneity of the web and embrace a whole new category: We're calling it "High Touch" marketing. Carefully crafted messages, exactly delivered. 

The new marketing will be touted as a break through, hybrid approach that combines state-of-the-art data-mining of demographics and combines it with quality messaging that is unique in both creative power and delivery. 

This may be critical marketing theory once we come to grips with the fact that the demographic over 50 years old controls over 75% of all wealth in the USA. And they may remember a time when advertising was delivered to them instead of just pushed off onto a screen. And they will probably remember that they liked feeling as though they were getting quality message, aimed directly at them, in a medium they enjoyed engaging with. Not all products and services will be able to slice down into the most cost effective slivers of the markets so there will always be mass market advertising that depends on the cheapness of the web. 

It will all be moot when video routs the final still imaging holdouts. The only thing that was holding video back was bandwidth and most of the fertile consumer markets have long since jumped that hurdle. Are we "looking forward" to a time when advertising just stream content 24/7? I'm not so sure but I may be outside that demo as well....

What does all this have to do with the image at the top of the article? Not much, except that I still like to see beautiful images that stand on their own. We may be the last few generations of people who share that regard. It makes me sad when photo reviewers like Thom Hogan write that the biggest impediment to success for companies like Nikon is not having software on the cameras that will easily and automatically send images immediately to the web. Why? So those images can join the millions of others queued up in the firehose? Seems like two concepts battling each other; the idea of a necessary and immediate flow of poorly considered images, flooding to the internet, versus brilliant concepts, careful planning and a process that would result on in glorious and stunning images that stand the test of time. 

Sad, if you believe that we can't have both. We can. Just not in the same wrappers....