What Now?

It's gloomy out there on the web. At least it seems to be for people who are interested in photography. I just read that Thom Hogan of Bythom.com is taking a month off. Maarten Heilbron, whose camera reviews on YouTube were always fact-filled, fact-checked and fun to watch has thrown in the towel on making camera reviews; mostly because the major camera makers have stopped spending enough on marketing to even be able to send out review cameras to reviewers. Not as give-aways but as temporary loaners. Maarten's post from a couple of days ago is entitled: "It's Over."  Of course there's the big story about DP Review shutting down as well. 

Many of our favorite bloggers who wrote about photography and cameras seem to have aged out, or run out of steam and inspiration. Topics skew far afield and little nuggets of good, insightful information abut photography have become harder to pan for than gold. 

I find blogging is widely devolving into a cult of personalities in which the writers' life and life stories are given much more emphasis than the topics we originally sought them out for. Yes, it's nice to have well written articles but even better when they are on subjects we're interested in. 

Both Thom and Maarten provided numbers or anecdotal information about the overall decline of the camera markets and, by extension, the world of the profitable practice of photography. From them as well as other sources I think we can agree that at least in the short term the outlook is bleak. Especially when measured by camera sales...

The ever-growing and deeper piercing nail in the coffin for most photographers with a certain tenure in the market is generative A.I. If you think it's kludgy or not ready for prime time you need to step up your research a bit and I think you'll see that, in capable hands, the technology is going to be is devastating for professional photographers. The taking of headshots, product shots, and most lifestyle advertising will vanish as jobs. Or projects. Or sources of income. All that will remain are folks content to sit in front of computer monitors carefully describing what they want the robots to make for them. And, when it comes to commercial work, why not? Clients always seem to know what they want. Their accounting departments are loathe to pay humans for silly stuff like.....art. And making up whole worlds on the fly is a heck of a lot quicker and infinitely cheaper than sending out a human to do their best with reality. Fantasy is much more addictive and hence much more lucrative for advertisers. No cameras or shoe leather required.

I remember watching a movie in the 1960's called, "Jason and the Argonauts." It featured lots of stop frame animation and claymation. Those were primitive visuals and yet the audiences went right along with the action. Now we can drop a computer generated stand-in for Carrie Fisher into a Star Wars movie ("The Last Jedi") and not even be able to tell that the moving image of her character is totally CGI. No suspension of disbelief required. Seamless --- and at thirty frames per second.

We don't have to dislike or renounce photography to grapple with where we are at this point in time. When the gear talk goes away so will community. There is no future in writing about the philosophies of picture taking. Why? Because as much as people profess to want access to such material only a tiny handful will really read it or search for it at all. How do we know? Because the internet has tested that for decades. We love to talk about gear. We are bored talking about aesthetics, or any non-mechanical process. 

I know you're tired of hearing about my fucked up refrigerator and the ongoing saga of corporate incompetence. I know most of you couldn't give a rat's ass about my ability to swim or the happiness I derive from it. And seeing yet another tranche of images from Austin's downtown is just depressing. It's the same for me on other blogs. Snooker? Breathing machines? Vegan-ism as religion? About as interesting to me as the nuances of the competitive flip turn are to you. 

So. What now? Without a ready market camera makers will slow down new product introductions. Eventually Fuji will make sure everyone who takes photographs with a dedicated camera has access to a Fuji X100V and will then probably shut down. Why bother after full saturation?

Some kids will mine the used market for rangefinder, film Leicas for the next few years and walk around in the street shooting with 28mm lenses until the last sources of 35mm film dry up and the labs close down. A few people who lack other talents will doggedly soldier on over at YouTube to make walk-and-talk videos about whatever new cameras or old news comes their way. But everyone is seems to be moving on, ditching photography as we've known it and replacing it with automatic content from their phones. 

Seems like the perfect time to retire. 

Here's my current plan: I'm 90,000+/_  page views away from my content here having generated 30,000,000 page views. That's measured by Blogger and not including stuff you read on an RSS feed. Add in those numbers and it's several times more. But I can only measure what I can measure. When I hit thirty million page views I'll take a big long look at the trend lines and if they are, as I predict, falling off a cliff I'll take note, sign off and leave the web to the last few, standing and producing photography experts.

I figure we're about a month away from the target date. I won't see it as a defeat if I decide that we're done. I'll see it as the turning of a page and my adaptation to human evolution ( or de-evolution). But I will say one thing. Now I understand how newspaper editors, writers and photographers felt as the ground slipped out from under their feet. 

One thing I'm going to do over the next 30 days is to write only about photography, cameras, lights and lenses. I'll try to give the blog a fighting chance at relevance. Wish me luck.